Comment by timr

Yeah...I've toyed with that, but there's still a productivity maximum where throwing it all away and starting from scratch is a worse idea, probabilistically, than just fixing whatever thing is clearly wrong.

Just to make it concrete, today I spent a few hours going through a bunch of HTML + embedded styles and removing gobs and gobs of random styles the LLMs glommed on that "worked", but was brittle and failed completely as soon as I wanted to do something slightly different than the original spec. The cycle I described above led to a lot of completely unnecessary markup, paired with unnecessary styles to compensate for the crappiness of the original DOM. I was able to refactor to a much saner overall structure, but it took some time and thinking. Was I net ahead? I don't really know.

Given that LLMs almost always write this kind of "assembled from StackOverflow" code, I have precisely 0% confidence that I'd end up in a better place if I just reset the working branch and started from scratch.

It kind of reminds me of human biology -- given billions of years of random evolution you can end up with incredible sophistication, but the end result will be incomprehensible and nearly impossible to alter.