Comment by ben_w

Mm.

I'd agree, the code "isn’t necessarily broadly coherent but is locally impressive".

However, I've seen some totally successful, even award-winning, human-written projects where I could say the same.

Ages back, I heard a woodworking analogy:

  LLM code is like MDF. Really useful for cheap furniture, massively cheaper than solid wood, but it would be a mistake to use it as a structural element in a house.

Now, I've never made anything more complex than furniture, so I don't know how well that fit the previous models let alone the current ones… but I've absolutely seen success coming out of bigger balls of mud than the balls of mud I got from letting Claude loose for a bit without oversight.

Still, just because you can get success even with sloppy code, doesn't mean I think this is true everywhere. It's not like the award was for industrial equipment or anything, the closest I've come to life-critical code is helping to find and schedule video calls with GPs.