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It ends up being a collection of disorganized business problems converted into code, without any kind of structure. this matches the description of every codeb

It ends up being a collection of disorganized business problems converted into code, without any kind of structure. this matches the description of every codebase (except one) I came across in my 30-year career

salomonk_mur 1y ago
Then you had some very shitty jobs. Good teams put time and effort in architecture before development. LLMs will produce code with good structure, as long as you provide that architecture before hand.
- Aeolun 1y ago
  Good teams are few and far between. I guess most of them are made over time.
- lovich 1y ago
  > Good teams put time and effort in architecture before development. I can only accept that as true if I also accept the fact that the vast majority of jobs won’t be on a good team
- lodovic 1y ago
  Most teams are understaffed and under pressure to deliver. Agile is all the rage so why spend time developing architecture when you can yolo it during the implementation phase?
maeln 1y ago
While I have a similar experience with, hurm, "legacy" codebase, I gotta say, LLM (in my experience) made the "legacification" of the codebase way, way faster. One thing especially, is the loss of knowledge about the codebase. While there was always some stackoverflow-coding, when seeing a weird / complicated piece of code, I used to be able to ask the author why it was like that. Now, I sometimes get the answer "idk, its what chatgpt gave me".
- markus_zhang 1y ago
  At least LLM write a huge amount of comments /s
gitaarik 1y ago
But that is for different reasons. There are definitely human created codebases that are clean, that no AI could match.
throwaway2037 1y ago
> except one Please share more!
tome 1y ago
I call this the Peter Principle of Programming: "Code increases in complication to the first level where it is too complicated to understand. It then hovers around this level of complexity as developers fear to touch it, pecking away here and there to add needed features." http://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/peter-principle/ http://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/peter-principle/ Seems like I'm not the first one to notice this either: https://nigeltao.github.io/blog/2021/json-with-commas-comments.html https://nigeltao.github.io/blog/2021/json-with-commas-commen...

salomonk_mur 1y ago

Then you had some very shitty jobs. Good teams put time and effort in architecture before development. LLMs will produce code with good structure, as long as you provide that architecture before hand.

Aeolun 1y ago
Good teams are few and far between. I guess most of them are made over time.
lovich 1y ago
> Good teams put time and effort in architecture before development. I can only accept that as true if I also accept the fact that the vast majority of jobs won’t be on a good team
lodovic 1y ago
Most teams are understaffed and under pressure to deliver. Agile is all the rage so why spend time developing architecture when you can yolo it during the implementation phase?

maeln 1y ago

While I have a similar experience with, hurm, "legacy" codebase, I gotta say, LLM (in my experience) made the "legacification" of the codebase way, way faster. One thing especially, is the loss of knowledge about the codebase. While there was always some stackoverflow-coding, when seeing a weird / complicated piece of code, I used to be able to ask the author why it was like that. Now, I sometimes get the answer "idk, its what chatgpt gave me".

markus_zhang 1y ago
At least LLM write a huge amount of comments /s

gitaarik 1y ago

But that is for different reasons. There are definitely human created codebases that are clean, that no AI could match.

throwaway2037 1y ago

> except one Please share more!

tome 1y ago

I call this the Peter Principle of Programming: "Code increases in complication to the first level where it is too complicated to understand. It then hovers around this level of complexity as developers fear to touch it, pecking away here and there to add needed features." http://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/peter-principle/ http://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/peter-principle/ Seems like I'm not the first one to notice this either: https://nigeltao.github.io/blog/2021/json-with-commas-comments.html https://nigeltao.github.io/blog/2021/json-with-commas-commen...