> we had a 10k line lua function that grew through ten thousand point modifications

> It's bad and humans caused it.

LLMs do the same thing. I review the code and interrogate the model about the bandaid fix it applied until the proper architectural solution becomes clear. Then the model implements the correct solution which usually involves some major refactoring.

> LLMs do not go through the struggle of understanding and don't experience the distress of "wtf am I reading?" and don't experience the drive to make things less horrible for the next person.

Of course not. That's the human's job.

And it's not every human either. Way too many humans are actually quite content to ship whatever works then go the hell home. Just a job after all.

I was arguing with a colleague today that we will never have a reason to make our AIs autonomous and sentient. But now I can't stop imagining an AI startup meeting where somebody says "LLMs do not go through the struggle of understanding and don't experience the distress of "wtf am I reading?"" and the next second the technical founders jump in joy "...that's our way in! Let's outcompete the competition by inventing pain for AIs!"

I've worked at many firms as a SRE/DevOps and have seen lots of human written code that fell into at least one or generally of the below patterns:

- 30+ committers on <5K LOC

- software is robust/rock solid but the code is essentially unreadable

- changes take a long time b/c there are no tests

Whenever folks mention that LLMs write buggy code I think of the above.