LLMs love to defensively wrap code instead of thinking holistically about the big picture. That creates a lot of bloat.

A human coder might OTOH follow the Boy Scout rule and clean up as they go.

That’s why even though 99% of my work is C#, llms have made it so I can finally call myself a low-level programmer, which I’ve always aspired to. I didn’t even have to do anything.

> I need to write code because otherwise LLMs will write too much code, ...

I second that and I can give an example that happened to me yesterday with a totally SOTA model (a US, not Chinese model).

I needed to display an information on the client-side. Something trivial. I ask the LLM to do it. The thing went onto a rampage: it somehow found a way to pass the information from the server to the client during the initial handshake (already: why, just why?). Modifying both server-side code and client-side code. And it worked.

To an unsuspecting programmer/tester (or automated test)/user: the info is there, what was asked has been done. So it's perfect, flawless LLM victory right?

Except none of that sloppy-pasta was necessary: the info was already available on the client-side and was a one-line change, purely client-side.

These thing shall definitely, as of 2026, write way too much code.

And btw the companies selling metered tokens have a very serious incentive to produce the most complicated, rube-goldberg, solutions that use as many tokens as possible, while still kinda solving the problem.

That way not only you consume tokens to produce the code, but later on you consume tokens when working on that code (which btw is a guaranteed thing: for the LLM just introduced new bugs in that gargantic amount of crap it output).

Funnily enough the very same people who made fun of copy-pasta happen to be in love with sloppy-pasta. Go figure.

If tokens are the problem, SDD is the solution