Comment by phplovesong
5 days ago
Did anyone think otherwise? AI generated code is obviously tech debt / legacy / whatever you want to call it. This was the same as 10-15 years ago when we saw that php dev copypasta from stackoverflow.
I expect code quality to be way, way worse in the coming decade. Its not legacy because of age, its legacy feom day one. Pure nightmare fuel.
I think most experienced programmers get this.
But it seems like advocates of "vibe coding" will fall into the trap of assuming "vibe code can't ever be legacy, because you can just point another LLM at it and it will pick up right where it left off"
What are you referring to with PHP dev copypasta from Stack Overflow?
From my experience and memory of that era, early versions of PHP had a very low barrier to entry and very simple and insecure methods for accessing a database. It was easy to program the CRUD logic of a website without knowing much about the rest of the pipeline, such as security or data cleansing.
This was also the era of jQuery with easy to use AJAX methods, which enabled almost anyone to create a front-end that calls backend code.
All of that was simple code that was easy to share with others on forums. This led to insecure websites where, to exaggerate slightly, every input field could be used for SQL injection attacks.
To be fair with PHP of that era, it was possible to create secure websites with it. It's that the ease of use created the illusion that once the website worked, you didn't have to tackle any other portions of development process such as quality control or security.
It was a glorious era.