Comment by fvdessen
5 days ago
I find it excellent news that all the techniques that make agentic coding more efficient also make human coding more efficient. There was a worry that code would become big mud balls that only AI understand, but it looks like the opposite. Clear code is important for AI productivity, so it now matters even more, because the difference of productivity is immediately and objectively measurable. Before AIs what code was well factored or not was largely a matter of opinion. Now you can say; look how better Claude works on codebase A vs codebase B, and present your case with numbers.
> There was a worry that code would become big mud balls
That's always been a worry with programming (see basically all Rich Hickey talks), and is still a problem since people prefer "moving fast today" instead of "not having 10 tons of technical debt tomorrow"
LLMs makes it even easier for people to spend the entire day producing boilerplate without stopping for a second to rethink why they are producing so much boilerplate. If the pain goes away, why fix it?
Literally less than an hour ago, I reviewed a bunch of LLM-generated boilerplate. I then told the agent to show me a plan to refactor it. I suggested some tweaks, and then it implemented the plan and then tested that it didn't break anything.
It isn't much different than dealing with an extremely precocious junior engineer.
Given how easy it is to refactor now, it certainly makes economic sense to delay it.
But I'm guessing you're doing those refactors because you know they're ultimately worth it, because you have experience programming since before LLMs?
Like I know boilerplate and messy code sucks because I've had to work with it, without LLMs, and I know how much it sucks. I think you do too, but I think we know that, because we had to fight with it in the past.
2 replies →
The type of person that would do that would have done the same thing without LLMs. LLMs don’t change anything except now they can just create their big ball of mud faster.
The pain of shitty code doesn’t go away. They can ship your crappy MVP faster, but technical debt doesn’t magically go away.
This is an awesome opportunity for those people to start learning how to do software design instead of just “programming”. People that don’t are going to be left behind.
"There was a worry that code would become big mud balls that only AI understand, but it looks like the opposite."
For now...
As long as interfaces are well defined, comprehensive tests are written, memory is safely handled and time complexity is analyzable, who cares what the rest of the code looks like.
I understand programming for the sake of programming, chasing purity and really digging into the creative aspects of coding. But I get that same kick out of writing perfect interfaces, knowing that the messier the code underneath is, the more my beautiful interface gets to shine. But transformers are offering us a way to build faster, to create more, and to take on bigger complexity while learning deeply about new domains as we go. I think the more we lean into that, we might enter a software golden age where the potential for creativity and impact can enter a whole new level.
> As long as interfaces are well defined, comprehensive tests are written, memory is safely handled and time complexity is analyzable, who cares what the rest of the code looks like.
Software engineers and anyone who'd get hired to fix the mess that the LLM created. Also, ironically, other LLMs would probably work better on...not messy code.
> But transformers are offering us a way to build faster, to create more, and to take on bigger complexity
Wow. You sound as if building faster or creating more is synonymous with quality or utility. Or as if LLMs allow us to take on a bigger level of complexity (this is where they notoriously crumble).
> we might enter a software golden age where the potential for creativity
I haven't heard of a single (good) software engineer whose creativity was stifled by their inability to code something. Is an LLM generating a whole book in Hemingway style considered creative, or a poem? Or a program/app?
> As long as interfaces are well defined, comprehensive tests are written, memory is safely handled and time complexity is analyzable, who cares what the rest of the code looks like
The thing is, code that does all of the things you listed here is good looking code almost by definition
If AI was anywhere near capable of producing this quality then it would be so thrilling, wouldn't it?
But it's not. The consensus seems to be pretty universal that AI code is Junior to Intermediate quality at best, the majority of the time
That generally isn't code that satisfies the list of quality criteria you mentioned
8 replies →
Yeh, exactly. Code doesn’t matter. Correct and stable electrical states matter.
Energy based models and machines that boot strap from models, organize their state to a prompt are on their way. The analog hole for coders is closing.
Most software out there is the layers of made up tools and such to manage and deploy software. We’ll save a lot of cycles pruning it all for generic patterns.
5-10 more years it’s all hardware again. Then no longer need to program a computer like it’s 1970.
I was struck by this too. Good error messages, fast tools, stable ecosystems, simple code without magic, straight SQL… it’s what I always want. Maybe agents will be what raises the bar for dev experience, simply because they work so quickly that every slowdown matters.