Comment by perrygeo

For me it comes down to Language. They're LLMs after all. They pattern match on tokens, and if your tokens have muddled semantics, you've lost before you even started.

I have a codebase where variables are named poorly - nah that's too generous, variable names are insane; inconsistent even within a single file and often outright wrong and misleading. No surprise - the LLMs choke and fail to produce viable changsets. Bad pattern = bad code generated from that pattern.

Going through and clarifying the naming (not ever refactoring) was enough to establish the pattern correctly. A little pedantry and the LLM was off to the races.

If LLMs are the future of coding, the number one highest priority for the software industry should be to fix muddled naming, bad patterns, and obfuscated code. My bet is that building clean code foundations is the fastest way to fully agentic coding.