Comment by altern8
2 hours ago
AI is great because my job is a lot easier, but it produces some extremely crappy code that would've NEVER passed a code review 1 year ago.
You could argue that it speeds up development by 5X or more, but then it slows down testing/verifying, code review, and in many cases it makes it impossible to review/rework by hand.
I just do what I'm told at work but even though I'm sure I'm in the minority I'm extremely skeptical that LLMs can produce any good-quality code.
Looks to me like we've just lowered the bar--by a lot--and stopped looking at the code that goes out. Every time I look into how Claude implemented something it's completely insane, with no way to refactor it or maintain it in the future.
I read this a lot, do you have examples of this? Last year the code produced by LLMs was pretty sloppy, but recent SOTA models seems pretty good to me. I'm curious if I'm missing something or it's folks using different models or difficulty levels.
From my experience, a snippet of code will look good.
But LLMs seem to have a hard time getting the big picture and reusing code that is already implemented and ALMOST does what you want vs. rewriting everything from scratch.
AI code is extremely difficult to read and follow. It's littered with hundreds of lines of comments and notes, often referring to other notes in other parts of the codebase, and often extremely out-of-date.
Claude seems to me to still focus on getting things done vs. doing it properly, so from my experience it would pretty often mess up your whole codebase just to be able to finish its task, vs. stopping and rethinking the approach.
After a few passes of that, with duplicate code with no underlying coherent vision, hundred of thousands of lines of documentation written as walls of text in markdown and weird coding decisions, your codebase is impossible to work out for a human.
I use Claude Opus 5 at high to plan, Claude Opus 5 at low to execute the plan.
I make it build things in small changes, I give very specific instructions about the architecture, and I make sure to point out existing functionality that can be used instead of writing something from scratch. But it's a lost battle because Claude can't learn and it's basically a black box.
It pretty shitty, but that's what they pay me for so I just do it.
> it produces some extremely crappy code that would've NEVER passed a code review 1 year ago
The 10x speed up comes from the fact that we have all given up on properly reviewing each others code and we just say “meh, it will be fine, lgtm”
This. The bar has never been lower.
Yes, exactly my point.
BUT, to me if we hadn't lowered the bar MASSIVELY, it would NOT be fine.
I've seen people at my work that will push or even deploy features that don't do what their main purpose is and they just dismiss the issue saying it's a bug. As an example, a button that's supposed to open a modal window if you click on it. If you go test it and the modal doesn't open, they'll say "oh, there's a bug".
You developed or even deployed something that is wrong and completely useless. Just one year ago, this would be unheard of and you would've gotten a really hard time for it. Now it's just a bug and part of how we're doing things.
Like I said, I just do what I'm told at work but to me this is just wild. There's no way it won't come back to bite us.