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I love working with Cursor/GenAI code, but there's one claim that I find repeated all the time that I found simply to be false - that junior/bad programmers put

I love working with Cursor/GenAI code, but there's one claim that I find repeated all the time that I found simply to be false - that junior/bad programmers put out tons of garbage code using GenAI assistants, that seniors later have to clean up. In my experience (mostly with Claude) generated code tends to be clean, nice looking, but ranges from somewhat flawed to totally busted. It's not ugly, messy code that works, but clean, nice code that doesn't. An inexperienced programmer would probably have no hope of fixing it up.

koliber 2y ago
Yes! I was explaining it to my wife yesterday. The code is clean, but occasionally the changes are in a completely wrong file. Or sometimes it changes something that is completely irrelevant. It's as if I had a decent programmer who occasionally loses his mind and does something non-sensical. This is dangerous because it's easy to get lulled into a false sense of security. Most of the code looks good, but you have to be very vigilant. It's the same with when LLMs generate writing. It sounds good, is grammatically correct, but sometimes, it's plain false.
thiht 2y ago
> that junior/bad programmers put out tons of garbage code That's what code review and mentoring are for. Don't blame tools, as a senior it's your role to pull the rest the team up. And in terms of process, it's ok to reject a PR or to delay it, business deadlines are not EVERYTHING. As a senior you're also in charge of what gets merged and when. You're the one responsible for the health of the codebase and tech debt.
- bunderbunder 2y ago
  I think that this actually gets to the crux of the problem. On a high functioning team working on a brownfield project, the bottleneck typically isn't churning out code, it's quality control activities such as code review. The larger masses of lower-quality code that people are able to produce with Copilot make that problem worse. If the seniors are doing their jobs well then AI-generated code actually slows things down in more mature codebases, because the AI-generated code tends to take longer to review, which means that the rate of code getting into production slows down even as the rate at which developers can write it in the first place increases. I would bet a lot of money that the people who claim huge productivity improvements with tools like Copilot are mostly self-reporting their own experience with solo and greenfield projects. That's certainly strongly implied by the bulk of positive anecdotes that include sufficient detail to be able to hazard a guess. It's also consistent with the studies we're seeing.
bunderbunder 2y ago
What I've seen is that the output is cosmetically clean code, but the design itself is messy. Probably the most annoying example of this is emitting one-off boilerplate code when an existing library function should have been used. For example AI-generated code loves to bypass facades and bulkheads, which degrades efforts to keep the system loosely coupled and maintainable. Just yesterday I was cleaning up some Copilot-generated code that had a bunch of call-site logic that completely duplicated the functionality of an existing method on the object it was working with. I can guarantee you that I spent a lot more time figuring out what that code was doing than its author saved by using Copilot instead of learning how the class they were interacting with works.

koliber 2y ago

Yes! I was explaining it to my wife yesterday. The code is clean, but occasionally the changes are in a completely wrong file. Or sometimes it changes something that is completely irrelevant. It's as if I had a decent programmer who occasionally loses his mind and does something non-sensical. This is dangerous because it's easy to get lulled into a false sense of security. Most of the code looks good, but you have to be very vigilant. It's the same with when LLMs generate writing. It sounds good, is grammatically correct, but sometimes, it's plain false.

thiht 2y ago

> that junior/bad programmers put out tons of garbage code That's what code review and mentoring are for. Don't blame tools, as a senior it's your role to pull the rest the team up. And in terms of process, it's ok to reject a PR or to delay it, business deadlines are not EVERYTHING. As a senior you're also in charge of what gets merged and when. You're the one responsible for the health of the codebase and tech debt.

bunderbunder 2y ago
I think that this actually gets to the crux of the problem. On a high functioning team working on a brownfield project, the bottleneck typically isn't churning out code, it's quality control activities such as code review. The larger masses of lower-quality code that people are able to produce with Copilot make that problem worse. If the seniors are doing their jobs well then AI-generated code actually slows things down in more mature codebases, because the AI-generated code tends to take longer to review, which means that the rate of code getting into production slows down even as the rate at which developers can write it in the first place increases. I would bet a lot of money that the people who claim huge productivity improvements with tools like Copilot are mostly self-reporting their own experience with solo and greenfield projects. That's certainly strongly implied by the bulk of positive anecdotes that include sufficient detail to be able to hazard a guess. It's also consistent with the studies we're seeing.

bunderbunder 2y ago

What I've seen is that the output is cosmetically clean code, but the design itself is messy. Probably the most annoying example of this is emitting one-off boilerplate code when an existing library function should have been used. For example AI-generated code loves to bypass facades and bulkheads, which degrades efforts to keep the system loosely coupled and maintainable. Just yesterday I was cleaning up some Copilot-generated code that had a bunch of call-site logic that completely duplicated the functionality of an existing method on the object it was working with. I can guarantee you that I spent a lot more time figuring out what that code was doing than its author saved by using Copilot instead of learning how the class they were interacting with works.