Comment by bluefirebrand

> When it does a good job, it's usually cribbing so heavily from existing solutions by humans you could have copied it yourself if you knew where it got it from. The LLM is automating copypasta, not deliberate coding

I've been saying this a lot lately. I agree completely. Most of the impressive stuff I see people talking about AI, they could have just copied and pasted from open source repos in the past

I think that was sort of a taboo in the past though, for several reasons. First off, most teams I've worked on were reluctant to take on the additional maintenance of unvetted open source code if there were other options. For some reason this reluctance has flown completely out the window with AI, even though the cost of code maintenance hasn't really decreased.

Secondly, there was always the question of code licenses when copying from an open source repo. Companies were reluctant to risk anything that could be viewed as code theft

Now the code theft part is solved by training LLMs instead of just copying and pasting, which just feels like theft with extra steps to me