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Comment by vanderZwan

15 hours ago

> From what I can see, the #1 way an AI produces "good code" is to simply work in the context of existing good code.

"Just Git Gud First" - Wouter van Oortmerssen

That's unnecessarily dismissive. I find the statement quite enlightening and I wish other engineers would realize the wisdom here.

LLMs are pattern matching machines. Your code is the base template that will determine all patterns moving forward. No amount of context engineering or prompting can save your code from itself.

Pragmatically, it suggests we need a much greater investment in code quality, and much less hand-wringing over AI tooling.

  • Apologies, I wasn't trying to be dismissive, it was meant to be a joke that the sentence read like an (earned) humblebrag.

    For context: I'm very active on the Goose discord (and have been following WvO's languages since Lobster was announced on Google Groups eons ago). I goof around there too, and forgot for a moment that outside of that chat it wouldn't be obvious that I'm being tongue-in-cheek.