Comment by gxs
1 day ago
Yes but it’s far better than anything anyone, let alone a small child, could make in 15 minutes
On the other hand an engineer might take a couple hours and build this in a clean way with the right prompting
These “got ‘em” ai criticism comments are getting so old
I wasn’t trying to make a “got em” comment.
The fact that this is possible and works at all is mind blowing - even more mind blowing is that my 8 yo is growing up in a world where they can talk to a machine to produce a custom application in seconds and they don’t realise how mind blowing it is!
In terms of the code, it would take even less time than that to tidy it up. For this application you wouldn’t bother. That’s almost a form of “premature optimisation” unless you’re actually planning on doing more work on it.
My hunch is that what the world is about to see a lot of is much bigger bits of work, or changes to other bigger existing systems done by people without the skills to know how to contain the complexity. That’s going to come with a burden.
The only reason it's a spaghetti mess is because it's not being prompted correctly by an expert.
Are these experts in the room with us right now? Because if even the creators of Claude seemingly can't prompt non spaghetti code (see: Claude Code leak), I'd like to know who can.
How do you know they were even trying in the first place? Have you analyzed the prompt they used?
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Speaking for myself - they may not have cared to.
I can absolutely prompt AI to following established patterns and produce nice, clean output in a legacy codebase. I also have a completely separate set of skill files that I’ve been building organically by allowing the agent to do make most decisions about conventions. The latter produces code that would be a nightmare to modify by hand, but I’m still able to iterate on it many times faster than I could in the codebase where code quality is a requirement.
“Code quality” is mostly “human readability”, and I’m simply not sure that’s a valuable attribute anymore.
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100%
A novice writing code by hand could also write spaghetti code
If you've worked in enterprise software, you might have seen that even competent professionals can write spaghetti code
At this point AI really is just garbage in garbage out
Haha it’s so comical how predictable downvotes are - which is a proxy for knowing what developers sensibilities are
Wild to me that we see this even in what is a relatively more “sophisticated” forum
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