[sph]

> Cliche-driven, over-metaphor'd, statistically-average purple-purpose _content_

If this is expected from LLM generated prose, why don't we expect LLM generated code to exhibit the same qualities?

> It's sad, really, that we're many years into this entire thing and it still can't produce something that doesn't have my eyes drifting from the page

It's great. Human creativity is still king despite the attempts to reduce it to a few algorithms for talentless hacks to exploit with the click of a button.

Who but the sociopath would hope to supplant human creativity with a machine they control? I wish your position wasn't so widespread in these parts.

[solid_fuel]

> If this is expected from LLM generated prose, why don't we expect LLM generated code to exhibit the same qualities?

That's the fun part, it does! I think people who don't pay much attention to the code they ship don't see it, but LLM written code has a lot of the same problems that LLM written prose does. It's repetitive, muddled, and relies too much on crutches - constant boilerplate and pointless, inaccurate comments.

[InsideOutSanta]

What might be bad for prose (predictable, boring) might be desirable for code. Maybe that's why LLMs work well for writing things read by computers, but not so much for things read by people.

[lelanthran]

> Maybe that's why LLMs work well for writing things read by computers, but not so much for things read by people.

They don't really work well for that, though.

The reason you hardly ever hear about it is because the people delivering code via LLMs aren't critically evaluating the code it generates. This is why Claude Code, a text app that is little more than glue between various text-suppliers, is what, 500k SLoC in a high level language?

[InsideOutSanta]

> people delivering code via LLMs aren't critically evaluating the code it generates

I guess this is the flip side of "you're prompting it wrong": "you only think it works because you can't tell how much it sucks."

[pigpop]

Core vim is around 300k lines of C89 code and it's just a text editor.

It's over a million lines if you include all the scripting, language features and tests.

[sph]

Vim has been around for decades, supports a billion architectures and an entire modal editing system plus a scripting language. And it’s in C, not a high level language so verbosity is higher. It’s really not comparable to a glorified frontend to an API.

[pigpop]

It turns out things are more complex than they may initially appear.

[sph]

Unless you're writing enterprise Java, conciseness and simplicity of design is still the ideal to aim for; those are not the adjectives I would use to describe LLM generated code.

Laziness is a feature. When you have a tool that is the exact opposite and solves code problems with more code, all you have is a machine that generates tech debt at exponential pace.

[Xirdus]

If code is predictable then it should be extracted into reusable functions/classes/modules and reused in accordance to DRY principle. I'm not a fan of this AI future where coding standards drop to the floor because humans won't be reading that code anymore.

[InsideOutSanta]

Predictable and redundant are not the same thing. Also, DRY is not a hard rule. Applying DRY like it's a rule creates bad code.