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This is the product that's claiming "coding is a solved problem" though.

I get a junior developer or a team of developers with varying levels of experience and a lot of pressure to deliver producing crummy code, but not the very tool that's supposed to be the state-of-the-art coder.

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> crummy code, but not the very tool that's supposed to be the state-of-the-art coder

Why not? It is subject to the same pressures, in fact it is subject to more time pressure than most corp code out there. Also, it's the model that's doing the coding, not the frontend tool.

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No one cares about code quality. No one has ever cared about code quality. It’s only been tolerated in businesses because no one could objectively say that ignoring code quality can result in high velocity. With coding agents, velocity is now extremely high if you get humans out of the way.
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"No one cares about code quality" - disagree. As a dev, I care about code quality in that shitty code makes my life suck.

As a user of terrible products, I only care about code quality in as much as the product is crap (Spotify I'm looking at you), or it takes forever for it to evolve/improve.

Biz people don't care about quality, but they're notoriously short sighted. Whoever nerfed Google's search is angering millions of people as we speak.

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It really shows that nobody cares about uptime at github or the jankiness of claude.

I wouldnt say that customers are indifferent, but it wouldnt be the first time that investor expectations are prioritized far above customer satisfaction.

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Sure, but as I stated, even "professional" code is pretty bad a lot of the time. If it's able to generate code that's as good as professional code, then maybe it is solved.

I don't actually think it's a solved problem, I'm saying that the fact that it generates terrible code doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have parity with humans.

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The bet is that it will be trivial for them to invest in cleaning up Claude Code whenever they face real competitive pressure to do so. My best guess is that it's a bad bet - I don't think LLM agents have solved any of the fundamental problems that make it hard to convert janky bad code to polished good code. But Claude Code is capable in my experience of producing clean code when appropriately guided, so it's not that there's no choice but jank. They're intentionally underinvesting in code quality right now for the sake of iteration speed.
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Have you tried just asking CC to make a codebase more elegant? It’s surprisingly effective up to a point. No reason to think that won’t work better down the road.
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> and then replacing those hacks with better code just never happens

Yeah, we even have an idiom for this - "Temporary is always permanent"

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We'll fix it later.

But as a great man once said: Later == Never.

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> I suspect if people saw the handwritten code of many, many, many products that they used every day they would be shocked.

Absolutely. The difference is that the amount of bad code that could be generated had an upper limit on it — how fast a human can type it out. With LLMs bad code can be shat out at warp speed.

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Oh I don't disagree with that. I am getting pretty tired of people making multi-thousand-line pull requests with lots of clearly AI-generated code and expecting it to be merged in.

I think the better unit to commit and work with is the prompt itself, and I think that the prompt is the thing that should be PR'd at this point, because ultimately the spec is what's important.

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> I think that the prompt is the thing that should be PR'd at this point, because ultimately the spec is what's important.

The fundamental problem there is the code generation step is non-deterministic. You might make a two sentence change to the prompt to fix a bug and the generation introduces two more. Generate again and everything is fine. Way too much uncertainty to have confidence in that approach.

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If you make the prompts specific enough and provide tests that it has to run before it passes, then it should be fairly close to deterministic.

Also, people aren't actually reading through most of the code that is generated or merged, so if there's a fear of deploying buggy code generated by AI, then I assure you that's already happening. A lot.

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