Comment by pragmatic
5 hours ago
Agent code can only be read and understood by agents. We’ve reached the point where people just can’t comprehend these giant code blobs.
Feature, bug or emergent property?
I don’t think the distinction matters as much as the reality.
We’re being locked into using the AI tooling bc the code was generated with AI tooling.
These giant files of doom were being generated by humans anyway and were very hard to work with. With LLMs it’s at last manageable or feasible to edit, refactor etc.
I honestly think LLMs are going to save us from ourselves as the codebases became too large and “messy” for humans to comprehend. (Mono repos of doom)
On a personal level these giant files are abhorrent but that’s just personal taste and I don’t think any of the Martin Fowler refactor/cleanup stuff is going to matter at all anymore. Kinda sad on some level.
> Agent code can only be read and understood by agents.
This just fundamentally isn't true and if this is your perspective then you're using LLMs wrong.
Fundamentally, the code can be understood by humans, but the volume of the generated code outpaces human capacity to understand it.
There was always bad code. Extend that to the general challenge of a bad hire doing net-negative things for the company. AI is a new problem because it 1000x a bad hire's blast radius. Personally, I'd even state that AI tends to turn an average and sometimes-but-not-always-good hire into bad hires because finally they get to do the thing they've always wanted at lightning speed in a way that previously the company red-tape wouldn't allow.
> These giant files of doom were being generated by humans anyway
Right, I've never seen an agent produce code anywhere near as bad as some of the human-generated code that I've worked on.
And, if your agent is producing huge files or functions, you can just tell it not to and it'll comply.