Comment by ModernMech
12 days ago
> It shouldn't be even a little surprising that your impression of the result is that the code is much better looking than the impression of a more experienced developer.
This really is it: AI produces bad to mediocre code. To someone who produces terrible code mediocre is an upgrade, but to someone who produces good to excellent code, mediocre is a downgrade.
Yeah. It turns 0.05X developers into 0.2X developers and 1X developers into 0.9-1.1X developers.
The problem is the 0.05X developers thought they were 0.5X and now they think they're 20X.
Today. It produces mediocre code today. That is really it. What is the quality of that code compared to 1 year ago. What will it be in 1 year? Opus 6.5 is inevitable.
These endless promises of something better to come are so common that it's become a meme.
That's what they've been saying for years now. Seems like the same FSD marketing. Any day now it'll be driving across the country! Just you wait! -> Any day now it'll be replacing software developers! Just you wait! Frankly, the same people who fell for the former are falling for the latter.
Rather, to me it looks like all we're getting with additional time is marginal returns. What'll it be in 1 year? Marginally better than today, just like today is marginally better compared to a year ago. The exponential gains in performance are already over. What we're looking at now is exponentially more work for linear gains in performance.
It produces the same quality code as it did years ago. The difference now is that it tends to function
Still bad code though
And by bad I'm not making a stylistic judgement. I mean it'll be hell to work with, easy to add bugs, and slow to change
This is the problem with the LLM fallacy.
You think it'll rapidly get smarter, but it just recreates things from all the terrible code it was fed. Code and how it is written also rapidly changes these days and LLMs have some trouble drawing lines between versions of things and the changes within them.
Sure, they can compile and test things now, which might make the code work and able to run. The quality of it will be hard to increase without manually controlling and limiting the type of code it 'learns' from.