Comment by ethbr1

AI currently writes median-good code which is by definition better than the worst developers' code.

In order to push beyond that (e.g. architecture, size, performance), the human has to bring the constraints. There's only so much AI can/should default assume from "write code for me" (which I expect a lot of bad / non-HN developers are doing).

It is exciting that there's an opportunity for global improvement though! After the general model improvement pace slows, expect there will be a lot of room for code gen AI optimization, and if "write code for me" can be made to generate more efficient code... suddenly all AI-generated code (read: most code) will improve.

Shit code is out in the wild because the company decided to optimize for programmer labor cost instead of code efficiency. If instead apples:apples because AI code gen is being used both ways, everyone wins.

Feels like what I imagine were the early days of optimizing compilers, when I'm sure there were a large number of really bad assembly programmers out there.