5 ms·

People in the future are going to wonder what the hell we were thinking, when 30 years down the line everything is a hot mess of billions of lines of code gener

People in the future are going to wonder what the hell we were thinking, when 30 years down the line everything is a hot mess of billions of lines of code generated by LLMs that no human has read almost any of it and is no longer possible for anyone to maintain neither with nor without LLMs. And the LLM generated garbage will have drowned out all of the good quality code that ever existed and no one will be able to find even human generated code anymore on the internet. Makes me want to just give up programming forever and never use a computer again.

ativzzz 5mo ago
By then, the fix will be easy. Fire up the latest LLM, point it at your codebase and tell it "rewrite this from scratch. do it well. fix the architecture mistakes"
- kurthr 5mo ago
  "Write me a really cool game, that will make me lots of money, fast!"
  - KumaBear 5mo ago
    Make me a 1hr episode of my favorite book. Make it as lore accurate as possible. Plot out the script for the next 100 episodes.
  - estimator7292 5mo ago
    I see your point, however: EA sports has been doing this for literally the entire lifetime of gaming as an industry
    - DonHopkins 5mo ago
      Electronic Sharts slogans and franchises: "Shit's in the Game!" "Chunder Everything" "Maddening NFL 26" "FIFiAsco 26" "UFC 26 (Un Finished Code)" "The Shits 4" "Battlefailed" "Need for Greed"
      - mlvljr 5mo ago
        [dead]
- fnoef 5mo ago
  "Make sure to double check everything, and MAKE NO MISTAKES!!!"
  - bhagyeshsp 5mo ago
    "YOU'RE A SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER!!!"
    - ryandrake 5mo ago
      "Ultrathink!"
  - unfunco 5mo ago
    Don't hallucinate!
- bulbar 5mo ago
  Will work just as good as today or 20 years ago.
  - cortesoft 5mo ago
    Are you suggesting AI coding was as good 20 years ago as it is today?
    - hrldcpr 5mo ago
      I think they're being sarcastic, saying that rewrites from scratch have rarely worked well (whether done by AI or humans).
      - bulbar 5mo ago
        Exactly. Sorry for not being explicit about it. I thought it was clear enough, because 'this code is crap, let's just rewrite the whole thing, doesn't look to hard' is kind of famous for being a bad idea most of the time since forever.
    - vrganj 5mo ago
      It sure wrote less crappy code.
- hasbot 5mo ago
  We can do this today too (but definitely hopefully future LLMs make better architectural decisions). With Claude, I've been working on an application for the last 2 months. I didn't have a great vision of what I wanted when I started but I didn't want that to slow me down. The architecture is terrible - Claude separated some functionality into different classes but did a bad job at it and created a big ball of mud. Now that I finally have my vision locked down and implemented (albeit poorly), it'd be a great time to throw it away and start over. It'd be interesting to see the result and see how long it takes.
  - ativzzz 5mo ago
    Just have claude (or gpt maybe) do an architecture review and request a multi-phase refactoring plan. This is probably better to do incrementally as you notice the balls of mud forming but it might not be too late. Either way, if it does something you don't like, `git checkout` and start over
- faizshah 5mo ago
  It won't be an LLM that does it, the entire feature of an LLM is it produces generalizable reasonably "correct" text in response to a context. The system that makes it have an opinion about good vs bad architecture or engineering sensibilities will be something on top of the transformer and probably something more deterministic than a prompt.
- orphea 5mo ago
  Do you think new LLMs are going to write better and better code? When all they are going to have is the slop generated by previous, worse models?
  - chickensong 5mo ago
    Yes. The models may have started from indiscriminate scraping, but people are undoubtedly working on refining the training data. Combined with the overall model capabilities, I suspect code quality will continue to go up. What you're suggesting is a negative flywheel where quality spirals down, but I'm hoping it becomes a positive loop and the quality floor goes up. We had plenty of slop before LLMs, and not all LLM output is slop. Time will tell, but I think LLMs will continue to improve their coding abilities and push overall quality higher.
    - orphea 5mo ago
      Let's agree to disagree. What I see is that while LLMs can do real tasks, they often produce overengineered unmaintainable slop (plenty of examples where code can be reduced 10x to do the same). I hope this is not a base to continue training LLMs on.
      - chickensong 5mo ago
        I don't disagree that there's a lot of slop getting churned out, you're not wrong there. I just have hopes that we'll course-correct after some initial adjustment period, but I have no idea how long that might be (guessing several years). I don't know how long LLMs will hold their position, but in my mind, it makes sense that computers will eventually be the best programmers. Humans will still guide, but rarely write or even read code. I might be dead by then, but that's my prediction for the future.
- jcalx 5mo ago
  There is definitely going to be some Wirth's law-like [0] effect about the asymmetry of software complexity outpacing LLMs' abilities to untangle said software. Claude 9.2 Optimus Prime might be able to wrangle 1M LoC, but somehow YC 2035 will have some Series A startup with 1B+ LoC in prod — we'll always have software companies teetering on the very edge of unmaintainability. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
  - AlotOfReading 5mo ago
    It's the Peter principle for computers. Codebases expand to the limits of the organization's ability to manage them. If you make one person use ed to write code for a bare metal environment, you'll get a comparatively small, laser-focused codebase. If you task a hundred modern developers to solve the same problem, you'll get a Linux box device running a million lines of JavaScript. Same thing happens in other fields. A rich country and a poor country might build equivalent roads, but they won't pay the same price for them.
jimmyjazz14 5mo ago
If that is the case market forces would likely favor hand written code and all the slop will be forgotten (unless the slop works fine and is stable).
- devin 5mo ago
  This is wishful thinking. The force of the market is "number go up". Quality increasingly has less and less of a role in the equation. You will eat your slop, and you will like it. It will be the only choice you have.
  - sesky 5mo ago
    But the quality of code was already very bad due to market forces. Most code at large companies is notoriously poor despite the talent density, because the incentives are not there to tackle tech debt or improve code quality. With such a low baseline, there is an optimistic perspective that LLMs could improve the situation. LLMs can produce excellent code when prompted or reviewed well. Unlike human employees, the model does not worry about getting a 'partially meets expectations' rating or avoid the drudgery of cleaning up other people's code.
    - devin 5mo ago
      The model is optimized in a different way to "partially meet expectations". Sycophancy coupled with only really "knowing" what it has been trained on assure a different kind of mediocrity.
    - switchbak 5mo ago
      The same incentives that discourage good code in pre-AI times are still dominating now. You will be pushed to ship sub-par products in the future, just like you were in the past. AI certainly has the potential to make the underlying code/design a lot cleaner. We will also be working with dramatically more code, at a much higher rate of change. That alone will be a big challenge to keep sustainable. The ones making the decision to under-invest on design are either are unaware of the real costs, or are aware and are deliberately choosing that path - that's not new, and I don't expect it to change.
jf22 5mo ago
First, most software is already a hot mess. Second, LLM code can be less of a hot mess than human written code if you put in the time to train/prompt/verify/review. Generating perfect well patterned SOLID and unit tested code with no warnings or anti-patterns has never been easier.
- glouwbug 5mo ago
  Right, but it takes one to know one. Many don’t have the ability to decipher what’s good stable output or not
- switchbak 5mo ago
  Like with a lot of things in this space, it depends where you invest your effort. If you care about quality design and good code, you can definitely get there - but that doesn't happen by default. With the right investment, we could certainly have tooling that creates and maintains very good designs out of the box. My bet is that we'll continue chasing quick and hacky code, mostly because that's the majority of the code that it was trained on, and because the majority of people seem to be interested in a quick result vs a long-term maintainable one.
- yakattak 5mo ago
  The only people who are going to put in the time, are people who care enough to. The problem is you have people who didn’t care before who were equipped with a garden hose. Now that they have a fully pressurized fire hose they can make more of a mess faster.
  - risyachka 5mo ago
    This is so on point that I want to cry.
  - senordevnyc 5mo ago
    Then they should be easy to defeat. Why are you complaining?
    - 5mo ago
cj 5mo ago
> Makes me want to just give up programming forever and never use a computer again. LLMs aren’t the first thing to come along and change how people develop applications. You had the rise of frameworks like Django, Rails, etc. Also the rise of SPAs. And also the rise of JS as a frontend+backend language. In a 3-5 yeats we’ll have adapted to the new norm like we have in the past
- toraway 5mo ago
  Or, it could be like asbestos and the immediate benefits are just too appealing to listen to arguments of skeptical naysayers about some vaguely defined problems that are decades away, if they even happen. I use AI tools daily (because they feel like they're helping me) but it's not exactly hard to imagine scenarios where an explosion of slop piling up plus harm to learning by outsourcing all thinking results in systemic damage that actually slows the pace of technological progress given enough time. History of new technologies tend to average into a positive trend over a long enough time scale but that doesn't mean there aren't individual ups and downs. Including WTF moments looking back at what now seems like baffling decision-making with benefit of hindsight.
  - cj 5mo ago
    > Or, it could be like asbestos If it is, the fall out will be way worse than if AI ends up living up to (reasonable) expectations. If it doesn’t, we are going to see over a trillion dollars of capital leave the tech sector, which I think will have worse impacts on the livelihood of tech workers than if AI ends up panning out. This is something the naysayers need to grapple with. We’ve crossed a line where this tech needs to work simply because of the amount of money depending on that fact.
    - toraway 5mo ago
      The asbestos hypothetical is a bit different than the "bubble popping" economic crisis scenario though. In this world, AI would just continue being adopted and shoved into every nook and cranny into which it can be made to fit, with valuations only getting bigger and bigger. The damage would come much later, well beyond the point where it could be simply pulled out and replaced without spending massive amounts of money and would also basically necessitate training an entire new generation of engineers. Then the AI giants would start appearing vulnerable like cigarette companies in the 90s while an AI Superfund and interstate class action are being planned but Sam Altman would already be a centitrillionaire at that point so it would be someone else's problem.
genghisjahn 5mo ago
I'm generally pro "llm assisted coding" or whatever you want to call it. But I do somethings think about the Butlerian Jihad from Dune. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune:_The_Butlerian_Jihad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune:_The_Butlerian_Jihad
- hermitShell 5mo ago
  If you like sci-fi takes on software systems, check out Vernor Vinge "A Fire upon the deep" and sequels. I recall ship systems software is something like all the code humanity has ever written, plus centuries of LLM churn. One of the protagonists is a space faring software developer particularly good with legacy code. We are used to thinking about software like in the article, a program that runs deterministically in an OS. Where we are headed might be more like where the LLM or AI system is the OS, and accomplishes things we want through a combination of pre-written legacy software, and perhaps able to accomplish new things on the fly.
  - genghisjahn 5mo ago
    Interesting, I kinda do this. Sometimes when an LLM solves a problem for me, I have it write code so that I can reuse that exact same approach deterministically(and I line by line check it). Now I have about a dozen CLI commands that the LLM can use and I'm reasonably (although not 100%) sure I'll get an expected outcome. Really helpful with debugging via steam pipe and connecting to read replicas.
  - Izkata 5mo ago
    Sounds like a recipe for Star Trek holodeck malfunctions.
  - DonHopkins 5mo ago
    Pham Nuwen is a master of vibe patching legacy sedimentary software.
  - genghisjahn 5mo ago
    Ordered Fire Upon the Deep. Looks interesting.
johnbarron 5mo ago
There is nothing in the post to support the statement. An interesting personal confession, but it does not establish that vibe coding and agentic engineering are converging as a general phenomenon. As a piece of meat, I look forward to charge rates of $10,000 an hour, to fix code out the vibe code generation.
- jitler 5mo ago
  [dead]
empath75 5mo ago
> People in the future are going to wonder what the hell we were thinking, when 30 years down the line everything is a hot mess of billions of lines of code generated by LLMs that no human has read -- It's just as likely that people will be surprised that we used to have billions of lines of human generated code, that no LLM ever approved.
throw_this_one 5mo ago
Why does it matter, as long as it accomplishes the task?
zuzululu 5mo ago
By then AI would be good enough to clean them all up....like I dont get these dooming scenarios they always assume that we are going to be stuck with LLMs and there wont be anything new coming.
- orphea 5mo ago
  By then AI would be good enough to clean them all up... [citation needed] To make my comment more on-topic: why do you think this is going to be the case? What newer LLMs will be trained on?
  - zuzululu 5mo ago
    well you are assuming that there's not going to be any new progress and that we are going to be stuck with whatever LLM version we have currently
    - orphea 5mo ago
      No. I assume that * we're already close to the ceiling of LLM capabilities: LLM providers probably already consumed everything they could. Plus there have been no large improvements for a while, only small and incremental. I believe Mythos-too-dangerous-to-release is a marketing bullshit, until proved otherwise. * people generate overengineered slop at light speeds. If that is the training base for future models, I doubt they're going to improve significantly, rather quality is going to stagnate at best.
murukesh_s 5mo ago
Hello from assembly programmers to present day javascript folks. Joke aside, I sometimes think how VS Code is written in such layers and layers of code - ~200mb of minified code - Java based IDEs were worser with almost 1GB of code (libs/dependencies). And VS Code did beat native editors (Sublime) of its time to dominate now - may be because of the business model (open & free vs freemium). But it does the job quite well IMO. And it enabled swarms of startups to go to market including billion $ wrappers - including Cursor, Antigravity and almost all UI coding agents. I remember backend developers (Java/C++ type) looking down upon Javascript developers as if we are from an inferior planet or something. How many of us remember that VSCode is actually a browser wrapped inside a native frame?
- yakattak 5mo ago
  [dead]
- skydhash 5mo ago
  VS Code has two things that worked well for it. Web Tech and Money. Web tech makes it easy to write plugins (you already know the stack vs learning python for sublime). And I wonder how much traction it would get if not Microsoft paying devs to wrangle Electron in a usable shape.
- k__ 5mo ago
  To be fair, MS send a world class engineer to make JavaScript usable for codebases at that scale.
- 000000000001 5mo ago
  >How many of us remember that VSCode is actually a browser wrapped inside a native frame? The new standard, Web Apps. Why update 3 seperate binaries for Win/Lin/Mac when you can do 1 for a web framework and call it a day?
michelb 5mo ago
If 30 years down the line I still have to look at code, maintain code, or even worry in the slightest about code, something went deeply wrong.
- skydhash 5mo ago
  Code will never go away. Code was there before computer hardware and it will always be there. Code is (almost?) all of computation theory so unless we throw computers away, we shall always use code.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - phainopepla2 5mo ago
    They're not suggesting that code will go away, but rather that it will be abstracted beneath an LLM interface, so that writing code in the future will be like writing assembly today: some people do it for fun or niche reasons, but otherwise it's not necessary, and most developers can't do it. Whether that happens or not is a different question, but I believe that's what they're suggesting.
    - skydhash 5mo ago
      Code is formal and there are basic axioms that grounds its semantic. You can build great constructs on top of those semantics, but you can’t strip away their formality without the whole thing being meaningless. And if you can formalize a statement well enough to remove all ambiguity, then it will turn into code. Programming is taking ambiguous specs and turning them into formal programs. It’s clerical work, taking each terms of the specs and each statements, ensuring that they have a single definition and then write that definition with a programming language. The hard work here is finding that definition and ensuring that it’s singular across the specs. Software Engineering is ensuring that programming is sustainable. Specs rarely stay static and are often full of unknowns. So you research those unknowns and try to keep the cost of changing the code (to match the new version of the specs) low. The former is where I spend the majority of my time. The latter is why I write code that not necessary right now or in a way that doesn’t matter to the computer so that I can be flexible in the future. While both activities are closely related, they’re not the same. Using LLM to formalize statements is gambling. And if your statement is already formal, what you want is a DSL or a library. Using LLM for research can help, but mostly as a stepping stone for the real research (to eliminate hallucinations).
pllbnk 5mo ago
I think it’s a mistake to think that we will be blindly going in this direction for many years and then suddenly collectively wake up and realize what have we done. It’s a great filter and a great opportunity. If LLMs stop improving at the pace of the last few years (I believe they already are slowing down) then they will still manage to crank out billions lines of code which they themselves won’t be able to grep and reason through, leading to drop in quality and lost revenue for the companies that choose to go all-in with LLMs. But let’s be realistic - modern LLMs are still a great and useful tool when used properly so they will stay. Our goal will be to keep them on track and reduce the negative impact of hallucinations. As a result software industry will move away from large complex interconnected systems that have millions of features but only a few of them actively used, to small high quality targeted tools. Because their work will be easier to verify and to control the side effects.
- leptons 5mo ago
  I wish I got to hallucinate at work, and just get a pat on the head for constantly doing the wrong thing.
  - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
    I mean you can do that, but the job probably doesn't pay too much. Might enrich your spirituality though.
  - pllbnk 5mo ago
    Maybe I am unlucky but I had worked with too many developers who couldn't make a good decision if their life depended on it. LLMs at least know how to convince you of their decisions with strong arguments.
    - nothinkjustai 5mo ago
      Mmm, I feel it’s more common for them to just blindly agree with whatever you say. Assistant: “I propose A” User: “Actually B is better” Assistant: “you’re absolutely right” User: “actually let’s go with C” Assistant: “Good choice, reasons” User: “wait A is better” Assistant: “Great decision!”
wan23 5mo ago
Have you ever encountered the very common real life situation where there's some software that works, and you have a binary for it but you either don't have the source code or it doesn't compile for whatever reason? This is the pre-LLM world. Now, do you think LLMs make this situation better or worse? You may not know what's wrong with your software or how to fix it, but unlike in the past you can throw compute at trying to figure it out, or replicating a subset of it, or even replicating all of it depending on what it is. I think LLMs are making this situation better not worse.
- lelanthran 5mo ago
  I think the problem with that sort of thought is that the burgeoning sizes of output for even trivial software makes it almost a certainty that: a) The stuff output by the existing LLMs is too unwieldy even for them to handle , even if the product itself is a glorified chatbot. b) If all software is throwaway, then the value of all software drops to, effectively, the price of an AI subscription. We'll all be drowning in a market of lemons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons), whilst also being producers in said market.
- kingleopold 5mo ago
  another aspect is amount of code LLMs can handle went from few lines to small codebase in few years, so future is just possible for a lot bigger codebases?
Keyframe 5mo ago
Why are we pretending everyone's code is an etalon of quality? Most software out there is probably hot mess already. No think behind it, let alone ultrathink.
- Maxatar 5mo ago
  Exactly, before the rise of LLMs it was not at all uncommon to hear people claiming that their job is to just Google API calls or copy and paste code from Stackoverflow. The context back then was that companies are being picky by hiring people who can demonstrate some modicum of understanding of data structures and algorithms because all any developer does is tweak some CSS or make some calls to a database to glue together a CRUD app... why should anyone be expected to know how to reverse a linked list, or how a basic sorting algorithm works... just download an npm package to do that stuff and glue it all together with a series of nested for loops. With the rise of LLMs that do all of that... those people shutup and shutup real fast.
beAbU 5mo ago
Have you ever worked on a legacy codebase with actual good code? I struggle to see the difference between your predicted future and today's reality when it comes to working with legacy disasters.
- jeromegv 5mo ago
  Well, on legacy code base, you still needed humans to write those lines of code. There's a maximal amount of lines a human can write in a year. Now with LLM we are talking of millions and millions of line of code that could be generated in a single day. The scale of the problem might not be the same at all.
stronglikedan 5mo ago
> is no longer possible for anyone to maintain neither with nor without LLMs. That's what the Tech-Priests are for.
- ofjcihen 5mo ago
  <INTERROGATIVE-HAVE YOU TRIED APPLYING INCENSE AND RECITING THE SACRED TECH LITANIES?>
ilaksh 5mo ago
30 years down the line a human will wake up in his climate controlled bed in an idyllic large scale people-zoo, think about what information he wants, and immediately his 900TB ferroelectric compute-in-memory exobrain will read his thoughts via his brain-computer-interface, and render a custom 3d visualization of that information floating in front of him. There will be no separate code stage, just neural rendering of data to pixels.
- giraffe_lady 5mo ago
  Who empties the bedpan?
  - sunrunner 5mo ago
    It's a tube and it's directly connected, for efficiency. Feel free to fill in the rest of the story.
- efnx 5mo ago
  Better not think a forbidden thought. Oh shoot! You just did! :)
  - frizlab 5mo ago
    Well thanks, I lost the game now :|
- butlike 5mo ago
  But are the pixels hot?
- sunrunner 5mo ago
  > custom 3d visualization of that information floating in front of him. Eh, what a waste. Can't we just stimulate the optic nerve? Or better yet, whatever region of the brain is responsible for me being able to 'see' anything? And perhaps we can finally get smell-o-vision too.
  - 5mo ago
MagicMoonlight 5mo ago
Have you seen Windows? We already have thirty years of slop.
pkulak 5mo ago
I can't get used to vibe-coded projects on Github. One that I was using for a little while is about a year old, with 40,000 commits and 15,000 PRs. And it has "lite" in its name; it's supposed to be the simple alternative. There were so many bugs. I fixed one, submitted a PR, but it was off the first page in hours. It will never be merged. I moved to a different project with a bit less... velocity, and it has been way smoother.
butlike 5mo ago
People, as a rule, don't really "go backwards." We didn't really walk back on the industrial revolution, and we're probably not going to walk back from this day-and-age's activities. It's only unsettling until the changes are accepted. The old timers can vie for a time before "all this" when they were children and all their needs were given to them by their now-deceased parents, and the cycle can continue on, yet again.

ativzzz 5mo ago

By then, the fix will be easy. Fire up the latest LLM, point it at your codebase and tell it "rewrite this from scratch. do it well. fix the architecture mistakes"

kurthr 5mo ago
"Write me a really cool game, that will make me lots of money, fast!"
- KumaBear 5mo ago
  Make me a 1hr episode of my favorite book. Make it as lore accurate as possible. Plot out the script for the next 100 episodes.
- estimator7292 5mo ago
  I see your point, however: EA sports has been doing this for literally the entire lifetime of gaming as an industry
  - DonHopkins 5mo ago
    Electronic Sharts slogans and franchises: "Shit's in the Game!" "Chunder Everything" "Maddening NFL 26" "FIFiAsco 26" "UFC 26 (Un Finished Code)" "The Shits 4" "Battlefailed" "Need for Greed"
    - mlvljr 5mo ago
      [dead]
fnoef 5mo ago
"Make sure to double check everything, and MAKE NO MISTAKES!!!"
- bhagyeshsp 5mo ago
  "YOU'RE A SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER!!!"
  - ryandrake 5mo ago
    "Ultrathink!"
- unfunco 5mo ago
  Don't hallucinate!
bulbar 5mo ago
Will work just as good as today or 20 years ago.
- cortesoft 5mo ago
  Are you suggesting AI coding was as good 20 years ago as it is today?
  - hrldcpr 5mo ago
    I think they're being sarcastic, saying that rewrites from scratch have rarely worked well (whether done by AI or humans).
    - bulbar 5mo ago
      Exactly. Sorry for not being explicit about it. I thought it was clear enough, because 'this code is crap, let's just rewrite the whole thing, doesn't look to hard' is kind of famous for being a bad idea most of the time since forever.
  - vrganj 5mo ago
    It sure wrote less crappy code.
hasbot 5mo ago
We can do this today too (but definitely hopefully future LLMs make better architectural decisions). With Claude, I've been working on an application for the last 2 months. I didn't have a great vision of what I wanted when I started but I didn't want that to slow me down. The architecture is terrible - Claude separated some functionality into different classes but did a bad job at it and created a big ball of mud. Now that I finally have my vision locked down and implemented (albeit poorly), it'd be a great time to throw it away and start over. It'd be interesting to see the result and see how long it takes.
- ativzzz 5mo ago
  Just have claude (or gpt maybe) do an architecture review and request a multi-phase refactoring plan. This is probably better to do incrementally as you notice the balls of mud forming but it might not be too late. Either way, if it does something you don't like, `git checkout` and start over
faizshah 5mo ago
It won't be an LLM that does it, the entire feature of an LLM is it produces generalizable reasonably "correct" text in response to a context. The system that makes it have an opinion about good vs bad architecture or engineering sensibilities will be something on top of the transformer and probably something more deterministic than a prompt.
orphea 5mo ago
Do you think new LLMs are going to write better and better code? When all they are going to have is the slop generated by previous, worse models?
- chickensong 5mo ago
  Yes. The models may have started from indiscriminate scraping, but people are undoubtedly working on refining the training data. Combined with the overall model capabilities, I suspect code quality will continue to go up. What you're suggesting is a negative flywheel where quality spirals down, but I'm hoping it becomes a positive loop and the quality floor goes up. We had plenty of slop before LLMs, and not all LLM output is slop. Time will tell, but I think LLMs will continue to improve their coding abilities and push overall quality higher.
  - orphea 5mo ago
    Let's agree to disagree. What I see is that while LLMs can do real tasks, they often produce overengineered unmaintainable slop (plenty of examples where code can be reduced 10x to do the same). I hope this is not a base to continue training LLMs on.
    - chickensong 5mo ago
      I don't disagree that there's a lot of slop getting churned out, you're not wrong there. I just have hopes that we'll course-correct after some initial adjustment period, but I have no idea how long that might be (guessing several years). I don't know how long LLMs will hold their position, but in my mind, it makes sense that computers will eventually be the best programmers. Humans will still guide, but rarely write or even read code. I might be dead by then, but that's my prediction for the future.
jcalx 5mo ago
There is definitely going to be some Wirth's law-like [0] effect about the asymmetry of software complexity outpacing LLMs' abilities to untangle said software. Claude 9.2 Optimus Prime might be able to wrangle 1M LoC, but somehow YC 2035 will have some Series A startup with 1B+ LoC in prod — we'll always have software companies teetering on the very edge of unmaintainability. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
- AlotOfReading 5mo ago
  It's the Peter principle for computers. Codebases expand to the limits of the organization's ability to manage them. If you make one person use ed to write code for a bare metal environment, you'll get a comparatively small, laser-focused codebase. If you task a hundred modern developers to solve the same problem, you'll get a Linux box device running a million lines of JavaScript. Same thing happens in other fields. A rich country and a poor country might build equivalent roads, but they won't pay the same price for them.

jimmyjazz14 5mo ago

If that is the case market forces would likely favor hand written code and all the slop will be forgotten (unless the slop works fine and is stable).

devin 5mo ago
This is wishful thinking. The force of the market is "number go up". Quality increasingly has less and less of a role in the equation. You will eat your slop, and you will like it. It will be the only choice you have.
- sesky 5mo ago
  But the quality of code was already very bad due to market forces. Most code at large companies is notoriously poor despite the talent density, because the incentives are not there to tackle tech debt or improve code quality. With such a low baseline, there is an optimistic perspective that LLMs could improve the situation. LLMs can produce excellent code when prompted or reviewed well. Unlike human employees, the model does not worry about getting a 'partially meets expectations' rating or avoid the drudgery of cleaning up other people's code.
  - devin 5mo ago
    The model is optimized in a different way to "partially meet expectations". Sycophancy coupled with only really "knowing" what it has been trained on assure a different kind of mediocrity.
  - switchbak 5mo ago
    The same incentives that discourage good code in pre-AI times are still dominating now. You will be pushed to ship sub-par products in the future, just like you were in the past. AI certainly has the potential to make the underlying code/design a lot cleaner. We will also be working with dramatically more code, at a much higher rate of change. That alone will be a big challenge to keep sustainable. The ones making the decision to under-invest on design are either are unaware of the real costs, or are aware and are deliberately choosing that path - that's not new, and I don't expect it to change.

jf22 5mo ago

First, most software is already a hot mess. Second, LLM code can be less of a hot mess than human written code if you put in the time to train/prompt/verify/review. Generating perfect well patterned SOLID and unit tested code with no warnings or anti-patterns has never been easier.

glouwbug 5mo ago
Right, but it takes one to know one. Many don’t have the ability to decipher what’s good stable output or not
switchbak 5mo ago
Like with a lot of things in this space, it depends where you invest your effort. If you care about quality design and good code, you can definitely get there - but that doesn't happen by default. With the right investment, we could certainly have tooling that creates and maintains very good designs out of the box. My bet is that we'll continue chasing quick and hacky code, mostly because that's the majority of the code that it was trained on, and because the majority of people seem to be interested in a quick result vs a long-term maintainable one.
yakattak 5mo ago
The only people who are going to put in the time, are people who care enough to. The problem is you have people who didn’t care before who were equipped with a garden hose. Now that they have a fully pressurized fire hose they can make more of a mess faster.
- risyachka 5mo ago
  This is so on point that I want to cry.
- senordevnyc 5mo ago
  Then they should be easy to defeat. Why are you complaining?
  - 5mo ago

cj 5mo ago

> Makes me want to just give up programming forever and never use a computer again. LLMs aren’t the first thing to come along and change how people develop applications. You had the rise of frameworks like Django, Rails, etc. Also the rise of SPAs. And also the rise of JS as a frontend+backend language. In a 3-5 yeats we’ll have adapted to the new norm like we have in the past

toraway 5mo ago
Or, it could be like asbestos and the immediate benefits are just too appealing to listen to arguments of skeptical naysayers about some vaguely defined problems that are decades away, if they even happen. I use AI tools daily (because they feel like they're helping me) but it's not exactly hard to imagine scenarios where an explosion of slop piling up plus harm to learning by outsourcing all thinking results in systemic damage that actually slows the pace of technological progress given enough time. History of new technologies tend to average into a positive trend over a long enough time scale but that doesn't mean there aren't individual ups and downs. Including WTF moments looking back at what now seems like baffling decision-making with benefit of hindsight.
- cj 5mo ago
  > Or, it could be like asbestos If it is, the fall out will be way worse than if AI ends up living up to (reasonable) expectations. If it doesn’t, we are going to see over a trillion dollars of capital leave the tech sector, which I think will have worse impacts on the livelihood of tech workers than if AI ends up panning out. This is something the naysayers need to grapple with. We’ve crossed a line where this tech needs to work simply because of the amount of money depending on that fact.
  - toraway 5mo ago
    The asbestos hypothetical is a bit different than the "bubble popping" economic crisis scenario though. In this world, AI would just continue being adopted and shoved into every nook and cranny into which it can be made to fit, with valuations only getting bigger and bigger. The damage would come much later, well beyond the point where it could be simply pulled out and replaced without spending massive amounts of money and would also basically necessitate training an entire new generation of engineers. Then the AI giants would start appearing vulnerable like cigarette companies in the 90s while an AI Superfund and interstate class action are being planned but Sam Altman would already be a centitrillionaire at that point so it would be someone else's problem.

genghisjahn 5mo ago

I'm generally pro "llm assisted coding" or whatever you want to call it. But I do somethings think about the Butlerian Jihad from Dune. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune:_The_Butlerian_Jihad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune:_The_Butlerian_Jihad

hermitShell 5mo ago
If you like sci-fi takes on software systems, check out Vernor Vinge "A Fire upon the deep" and sequels. I recall ship systems software is something like all the code humanity has ever written, plus centuries of LLM churn. One of the protagonists is a space faring software developer particularly good with legacy code. We are used to thinking about software like in the article, a program that runs deterministically in an OS. Where we are headed might be more like where the LLM or AI system is the OS, and accomplishes things we want through a combination of pre-written legacy software, and perhaps able to accomplish new things on the fly.
- genghisjahn 5mo ago
  Interesting, I kinda do this. Sometimes when an LLM solves a problem for me, I have it write code so that I can reuse that exact same approach deterministically(and I line by line check it). Now I have about a dozen CLI commands that the LLM can use and I'm reasonably (although not 100%) sure I'll get an expected outcome. Really helpful with debugging via steam pipe and connecting to read replicas.
- Izkata 5mo ago
  Sounds like a recipe for Star Trek holodeck malfunctions.
- DonHopkins 5mo ago
  Pham Nuwen is a master of vibe patching legacy sedimentary software.
- genghisjahn 5mo ago
  Ordered Fire Upon the Deep. Looks interesting.

johnbarron 5mo ago

There is nothing in the post to support the statement. An interesting personal confession, but it does not establish that vibe coding and agentic engineering are converging as a general phenomenon. As a piece of meat, I look forward to charge rates of $10,000 an hour, to fix code out the vibe code generation.

jitler 5mo ago
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empath75 5mo ago

> People in the future are going to wonder what the hell we were thinking, when 30 years down the line everything is a hot mess of billions of lines of code generated by LLMs that no human has read -- It's just as likely that people will be surprised that we used to have billions of lines of human generated code, that no LLM ever approved.

throw_this_one 5mo ago

Why does it matter, as long as it accomplishes the task?

zuzululu 5mo ago

By then AI would be good enough to clean them all up....like I dont get these dooming scenarios they always assume that we are going to be stuck with LLMs and there wont be anything new coming.

orphea 5mo ago
By then AI would be good enough to clean them all up... [citation needed] To make my comment more on-topic: why do you think this is going to be the case? What newer LLMs will be trained on?
- zuzululu 5mo ago
  well you are assuming that there's not going to be any new progress and that we are going to be stuck with whatever LLM version we have currently
  - orphea 5mo ago
    No. I assume that * we're already close to the ceiling of LLM capabilities: LLM providers probably already consumed everything they could. Plus there have been no large improvements for a while, only small and incremental. I believe Mythos-too-dangerous-to-release is a marketing bullshit, until proved otherwise. * people generate overengineered slop at light speeds. If that is the training base for future models, I doubt they're going to improve significantly, rather quality is going to stagnate at best.

murukesh_s 5mo ago

Hello from assembly programmers to present day javascript folks. Joke aside, I sometimes think how VS Code is written in such layers and layers of code - ~200mb of minified code - Java based IDEs were worser with almost 1GB of code (libs/dependencies). And VS Code did beat native editors (Sublime) of its time to dominate now - may be because of the business model (open & free vs freemium). But it does the job quite well IMO. And it enabled swarms of startups to go to market including billion $ wrappers - including Cursor, Antigravity and almost all UI coding agents. I remember backend developers (Java/C++ type) looking down upon Javascript developers as if we are from an inferior planet or something. How many of us remember that VSCode is actually a browser wrapped inside a native frame?

yakattak 5mo ago
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skydhash 5mo ago
VS Code has two things that worked well for it. Web Tech and Money. Web tech makes it easy to write plugins (you already know the stack vs learning python for sublime). And I wonder how much traction it would get if not Microsoft paying devs to wrangle Electron in a usable shape.
k__ 5mo ago
To be fair, MS send a world class engineer to make JavaScript usable for codebases at that scale.
000000000001 5mo ago
>How many of us remember that VSCode is actually a browser wrapped inside a native frame? The new standard, Web Apps. Why update 3 seperate binaries for Win/Lin/Mac when you can do 1 for a web framework and call it a day?

michelb 5mo ago

If 30 years down the line I still have to look at code, maintain code, or even worry in the slightest about code, something went deeply wrong.

skydhash 5mo ago
Code will never go away. Code was there before computer hardware and it will always be there. Code is (almost?) all of computation theory so unless we throw computers away, we shall always use code.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- phainopepla2 5mo ago
  They're not suggesting that code will go away, but rather that it will be abstracted beneath an LLM interface, so that writing code in the future will be like writing assembly today: some people do it for fun or niche reasons, but otherwise it's not necessary, and most developers can't do it. Whether that happens or not is a different question, but I believe that's what they're suggesting.
  - skydhash 5mo ago
    Code is formal and there are basic axioms that grounds its semantic. You can build great constructs on top of those semantics, but you can’t strip away their formality without the whole thing being meaningless. And if you can formalize a statement well enough to remove all ambiguity, then it will turn into code. Programming is taking ambiguous specs and turning them into formal programs. It’s clerical work, taking each terms of the specs and each statements, ensuring that they have a single definition and then write that definition with a programming language. The hard work here is finding that definition and ensuring that it’s singular across the specs. Software Engineering is ensuring that programming is sustainable. Specs rarely stay static and are often full of unknowns. So you research those unknowns and try to keep the cost of changing the code (to match the new version of the specs) low. The former is where I spend the majority of my time. The latter is why I write code that not necessary right now or in a way that doesn’t matter to the computer so that I can be flexible in the future. While both activities are closely related, they’re not the same. Using LLM to formalize statements is gambling. And if your statement is already formal, what you want is a DSL or a library. Using LLM for research can help, but mostly as a stepping stone for the real research (to eliminate hallucinations).

pllbnk 5mo ago

I think it’s a mistake to think that we will be blindly going in this direction for many years and then suddenly collectively wake up and realize what have we done. It’s a great filter and a great opportunity. If LLMs stop improving at the pace of the last few years (I believe they already are slowing down) then they will still manage to crank out billions lines of code which they themselves won’t be able to grep and reason through, leading to drop in quality and lost revenue for the companies that choose to go all-in with LLMs. But let’s be realistic - modern LLMs are still a great and useful tool when used properly so they will stay. Our goal will be to keep them on track and reduce the negative impact of hallucinations. As a result software industry will move away from large complex interconnected systems that have millions of features but only a few of them actively used, to small high quality targeted tools. Because their work will be easier to verify and to control the side effects.

leptons 5mo ago
I wish I got to hallucinate at work, and just get a pat on the head for constantly doing the wrong thing.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
  I mean you can do that, but the job probably doesn't pay too much. Might enrich your spirituality though.
- pllbnk 5mo ago
  Maybe I am unlucky but I had worked with too many developers who couldn't make a good decision if their life depended on it. LLMs at least know how to convince you of their decisions with strong arguments.
  - nothinkjustai 5mo ago
    Mmm, I feel it’s more common for them to just blindly agree with whatever you say. Assistant: “I propose A” User: “Actually B is better” Assistant: “you’re absolutely right” User: “actually let’s go with C” Assistant: “Good choice, reasons” User: “wait A is better” Assistant: “Great decision!”

wan23 5mo ago

Have you ever encountered the very common real life situation where there's some software that works, and you have a binary for it but you either don't have the source code or it doesn't compile for whatever reason? This is the pre-LLM world. Now, do you think LLMs make this situation better or worse? You may not know what's wrong with your software or how to fix it, but unlike in the past you can throw compute at trying to figure it out, or replicating a subset of it, or even replicating all of it depending on what it is. I think LLMs are making this situation better not worse.

lelanthran 5mo ago
I think the problem with that sort of thought is that the burgeoning sizes of output for even trivial software makes it almost a certainty that: a) The stuff output by the existing LLMs is too unwieldy even for them to handle , even if the product itself is a glorified chatbot. b) If all software is throwaway, then the value of all software drops to, effectively, the price of an AI subscription. We'll all be drowning in a market of lemons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons), whilst also being producers in said market.
kingleopold 5mo ago
another aspect is amount of code LLMs can handle went from few lines to small codebase in few years, so future is just possible for a lot bigger codebases?

Keyframe 5mo ago

Why are we pretending everyone's code is an etalon of quality? Most software out there is probably hot mess already. No think behind it, let alone ultrathink.

Maxatar 5mo ago
Exactly, before the rise of LLMs it was not at all uncommon to hear people claiming that their job is to just Google API calls or copy and paste code from Stackoverflow. The context back then was that companies are being picky by hiring people who can demonstrate some modicum of understanding of data structures and algorithms because all any developer does is tweak some CSS or make some calls to a database to glue together a CRUD app... why should anyone be expected to know how to reverse a linked list, or how a basic sorting algorithm works... just download an npm package to do that stuff and glue it all together with a series of nested for loops. With the rise of LLMs that do all of that... those people shutup and shutup real fast.

beAbU 5mo ago

Have you ever worked on a legacy codebase with actual good code? I struggle to see the difference between your predicted future and today's reality when it comes to working with legacy disasters.

jeromegv 5mo ago
Well, on legacy code base, you still needed humans to write those lines of code. There's a maximal amount of lines a human can write in a year. Now with LLM we are talking of millions and millions of line of code that could be generated in a single day. The scale of the problem might not be the same at all.

stronglikedan 5mo ago

> is no longer possible for anyone to maintain neither with nor without LLMs. That's what the Tech-Priests are for.

ofjcihen 5mo ago
<INTERROGATIVE-HAVE YOU TRIED APPLYING INCENSE AND RECITING THE SACRED TECH LITANIES?>

ilaksh 5mo ago

30 years down the line a human will wake up in his climate controlled bed in an idyllic large scale people-zoo, think about what information he wants, and immediately his 900TB ferroelectric compute-in-memory exobrain will read his thoughts via his brain-computer-interface, and render a custom 3d visualization of that information floating in front of him. There will be no separate code stage, just neural rendering of data to pixels.

giraffe_lady 5mo ago
Who empties the bedpan?
- sunrunner 5mo ago
  It's a tube and it's directly connected, for efficiency. Feel free to fill in the rest of the story.
efnx 5mo ago
Better not think a forbidden thought. Oh shoot! You just did! :)
- frizlab 5mo ago
  Well thanks, I lost the game now :|
butlike 5mo ago
But are the pixels hot?
sunrunner 5mo ago
> custom 3d visualization of that information floating in front of him. Eh, what a waste. Can't we just stimulate the optic nerve? Or better yet, whatever region of the brain is responsible for me being able to 'see' anything? And perhaps we can finally get smell-o-vision too.
- 5mo ago

MagicMoonlight 5mo ago

Have you seen Windows? We already have thirty years of slop.

pkulak 5mo ago

I can't get used to vibe-coded projects on Github. One that I was using for a little while is about a year old, with 40,000 commits and 15,000 PRs. And it has "lite" in its name; it's supposed to be the simple alternative. There were so many bugs. I fixed one, submitted a PR, but it was off the first page in hours. It will never be merged. I moved to a different project with a bit less... velocity, and it has been way smoother.

butlike 5mo ago

People, as a rule, don't really "go backwards." We didn't really walk back on the industrial revolution, and we're probably not going to walk back from this day-and-age's activities. It's only unsettling until the changes are accepted. The old timers can vie for a time before "all this" when they were children and all their needs were given to them by their now-deceased parents, and the cycle can continue on, yet again.