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How do you know they were even trying in the first place? Have you analyzed the prompt they used?
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How do you know they weren't? Have you analyzed the prompt they used?

There's no shortage of examples of unmaintainable spaghetti AI code, Claude Code is just one of many. If you have examples of good codebases maintained by "prompting experts", I'd love to see them.

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Pretty much any existing project (that started before LLMs were a thing) who accepts LLM-generated code, I would argue fits your requirement, since the PRs adhere to their existing code style and guidelines, or they wouldn't be accepted in the first place. In those cases it may be impossible to tell that an LLM was even involved.

Recent notable examples would be the Linux kernel or cURL.

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The difference is he’s not passing judgement on it or jumping to conclusions, fyi
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Nobody is jumping to conclusions. There's enough examples to come to perfectly reasonable conclusions and judgements.
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Speaking for myself - they may not have cared to.

I can absolutely prompt AI to following established patterns and produce nice, clean output in a legacy codebase. I also have a completely separate set of skill files that I’ve been building organically by allowing the agent to do make most decisions about conventions. The latter produces code that would be a nightmare to modify by hand, but I’m still able to iterate on it many times faster than I could in the codebase where code quality is a requirement.

“Code quality” is mostly “human readability”, and I’m simply not sure that’s a valuable attribute anymore.

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> “Code quality” is mostly “human readability”

That's an extremely narrow view of programming, and shows a complete lack of experience.

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