Comment by mvkel
12 days ago
So here we have OpenSSL, coded by humans, universally adopted by the Internet, universally deemed to be terrible code.
More evidence that "coding elegance" is irrelevant to a product's success, which bodes well for AI generated code.
If anything, this is evidence that coding elegance has value.
The unexpected part here being that AI brings specks of elegance to a terrible, inelegant codebase.
The sad reality is that if your code is available for free and works most of the time, nothing else matters. I'm not sure I would call it "product success" given that OpenSSL's income is enough to cover, like, one dude in a LCOL country some of the time.
It seems to me that after seeing some of the presentations by the LibreSSL folks that OpenSSL is not evidence of elegant code.
I find it scary TBH that we're on track to have more OpenSSL-level software.
Openssl? Code elegance?
I think they're saying that OpenSSL is NOT elegant, but that it is successful regardless; hence, code elegance is irrelevant to whether a product is successful or not (and thus that horribly ugly LLM-generated code has a shot at becoming successful).
[dead]