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by therealpygon 5 days ago
For software that became popular, sure. Have you spent a lot of time looking at horribly written unpopular software that far outpaces the popular ones in quantity, not quality?

I fully agree that a well-written human application can be far better organized and documented. But I’m not talking about the top 10% that most people interact with and focus on, but rather the bottom 90% that get far fewer eyes and are way more poorly written, regardless of perceived complexity.
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Aachen 5 days ago
Hah, that's a unique argument. I haven't before been quizzed on how much time I spend with unpopular software. Do you have a minute? xD I think I use more unpopular software than 99% of the world population. Besides that it's part of my job to security test what are usually internal applications (every ~two weeks a new one), I also use basically only software from F-Droid and the Debian repositories, pulling only the apps from the Play Store from (semi) governments where it's unpractical to get by without them. Besides that, a lot of what I use is self-written, with number of users at most a few hundred, biasing heavily towards one. Yes, I'm familiar with hobby coding projects thank you very much :D

> I’m not talking about the top 10% that most people interact with and focus on

I’m glad we're on the same page then :)

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therealpygon 5 days ago
I have all the time in the world for interesting topics of debate. I’ve equally reviewed quite a lot of poorly written tools, libraries, and APIs in the search for far less mainstream solutions to complex problems; guess our conclusions on what quality we found differ, which is the human experience.

Like I said, I’m not claiming AI outperforms in quality in all cases; it can be just as bad as human code can be. I just disagree with the idea that “human written” is a proxy for “quality code” in my experience.

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skydhash 4 days ago
Human written is not a proxy of good code. But human written and published on a hosting platform (with the additional artifacts like docs, build system, tests) are generally good. While LLM may generate all of these, but they are slop.
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