Comment by ben_w
25 days ago
> The Daily WTF at least once. That's representative of the average
I'd say The Daily WTF are the more spectacularly weird and wrong, not representative; I've seen a few things deserving to be on their site in real life*, but the average I've seen has been much better than that.
It's difficult to be sure, but I think these models are roughly like someone with 1-3 years of experience, though the worst codebase(s) I've seen have been from person(s) who somehow lasted a decade or two in the industry.
* 1000 lines inside an always-true if-block, a pantheon of god classes that poorly re-invent the concept of named properties, copy-pasting class files rather than subclassing even after I'd added comments about needing to de-duplicate things in them, and that was all the same project.
I have certainly seen some things from people who were previously colleagues that would make a number of hilarious Daily WTF posts. :(
Apart from my own personal anecdotal information, the state of web development is absolutely dire [^1]. Software bloat has been a problem for as long as I've been using computers. In fact, the software crisis [^2] predates _me_, and I'm an old man.
I'm sure there are people who disagree that inefficiency in software is a problem at all, or that it's even related to the original question (whether LLMs have reached the level of an average programmer). LLMs can generate an astronomical amount of bloat! Because that's what they have been trained on. Most of the code in the wild is outrageously bad.
And that's my point. LLMs absolutely have reached the level of average programmers because average programmers produce code that most critical thinkers believe is of objectively low quality.
I can't say what the average years of experience is for the developers that create these SPA behemoths. Perhaps an estimate based on the Stack Overflow Annual Developer Survey is in the right ballpark. Most respondents (21.1%) in 2025 have been coding for 6 - 10 years [^3]. This is of course across all domains, not just web development. Without detailed breakdowns, this is the best information I have on the subject.
[^1]: https://tonsky.me/blog/js-bloat/
[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_crisis
[^3]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/developers#2-years-codi...