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That sounds more like an organizational problem. If you are an employee that doesn't care about maintainability of code, e.g. a freelancer working on a project

That sounds more like an organizational problem. If you are an employee that doesn't care about maintainability of code, e.g. a freelancer working on a project you will never touch again after your contract is over, your incentive has always been to write crappy code as quickly as possible. Previously that took the form of copying cheap templates, copying and pasting code from StackOverflow as-is without adjustments, not caring about style, using tools to autogenerate bindings, and so on. I remember a long time ago I took over a web project that a freelancer had worked on, and when I opened it I saw one large file of mixed python and HTML. He literally just copied and pasted whole html pages into the render statements in the server code. The same is true for many people submitting PRs to OSS. They don't care about making real contributions, they just want to put something on their resume. AI is probably making it more common, but it really isn't a new issue, and is not directly related to LLMs.

tschumacher 1y ago
Yes, this is it. The idea that LLMs somehow write this deceptive code that magically looks right but isn't is just silly. Why would that be the case? If someone finds they are good at writing code (hard to define of course but take a "measure" like long term maintainability for example) but they fail to catch bad code in review it is just an issue with their skill. Reviewing code can be trained just as writing code can be. A good first step might be to ask oneself: "how would I have approached this".
tonyedgecombe 1y ago
>If you are an employee that doesn't care about maintainability of code, e.g. a freelancer working on a project you will never touch again after your contract is over, your incentive has always been to write crappy code as quickly as possible. I never did this when I was a freelancer.
distances 1y ago
> freelancer working on a project you will never touch again after your contract is over, your incentive has always been to write crappy code as quickly as possible I don't agree with this at all. As a freelancer your incentive is to extend the contract or be remembered as the best contractor when the client needs help again. You should be the expert that improves the codebase and development practices, someone the internals can learn from.

tschumacher 1y ago

Yes, this is it. The idea that LLMs somehow write this deceptive code that magically looks right but isn't is just silly. Why would that be the case? If someone finds they are good at writing code (hard to define of course but take a "measure" like long term maintainability for example) but they fail to catch bad code in review it is just an issue with their skill. Reviewing code can be trained just as writing code can be. A good first step might be to ask oneself: "how would I have approached this".

tonyedgecombe 1y ago

>If you are an employee that doesn't care about maintainability of code, e.g. a freelancer working on a project you will never touch again after your contract is over, your incentive has always been to write crappy code as quickly as possible. I never did this when I was a freelancer.

distances 1y ago

> freelancer working on a project you will never touch again after your contract is over, your incentive has always been to write crappy code as quickly as possible I don't agree with this at all. As a freelancer your incentive is to extend the contract or be remembered as the best contractor when the client needs help again. You should be the expert that improves the codebase and development practices, someone the internals can learn from.