Sucky human-written code is still based on human understanding, which can change over time, be readjusted or solidified. People implement something wrong once, then update their perspective, then in the future does it right.

LLMs doesn't have this benefit. You forget to add the correct to the system prompt, and the LLM will repeat the same mistake over and over, and worse than that, their mistakes aren't based on their understanding, it's basically random guesses.

Humans, even bad coders, still seem to have some sort of architecture in mind, even if it's spaghetti, whereas LLMs (obviously) don't think more than a few steps, and never about the full scope of what they're contributing too, and on purpose too, because you want the context to be as small as possible when you work with LLMs.

With LLMs you need to thread carefully between "What does the LLM need to know?" and "Can I skip passing this to the LLM this time?" while a human you can more or less dump them everything you sit on, and let them shift it through, and they'll mostly make it out OK.

I think the real issue might be that how “good” the code is matters less than being able to form a mental model for what the human who wrote the code was “thinking”. If written by a machine, this contract is broken and we get more confused, even if our traditional methods of evaluating the code come out equal.

That doesn’t help the developers who have high standards.

And where do you think the LLM learned coding from?

But anyway, let the LLM verify the code to give advice on improvements but don't let it write code unverified. That's my opinion on it anyway.

I've been sent code from vendors that didn't even compile, long before llms were a thing. Most shops that aren't primarily software have really really terrible software.

> Can there be bugs? Sure. That's the price of not reading or understanding every line.

I've yet to come across a human developer who's output would meet this standard, despite writing every line.

In fact, having an LLM review our code is catching quite a few bugs before it reaches QA.

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Yes, LLMs generate technical debt.

And they do it faster than any human developer.

I would say "only if you can review said work yourself alone", rather than "do".

I'm an experienced developer, but I don't count myself as a web dev or a python dev; I can review the web and python stuff I get out of the AI (sometimes I need to ask the AI follow-up questions so I can find official documentation for what it did), but I can't write it.

Yeah, it’s so easy to generate code that you can do a whole codebase rewrite in a day.

Is this a good idea? Probably not—in the past we would only do that when the architecture was causing serious problems since it always has tons of behaviors that will accidentally not get carried forward, some of which are load bearing and will cause bugs.

Now we can do it in an afternoon and get the same long term bug behavior.

Now imagine decades of LLM code. Extrapolating the rate of increase of LoC, the source code ain't gonna fit on hard drives anymore.