6 ms·

> A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden. This assumes that the models of the future won't find it easier to just t

> A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden. This assumes that the models of the future won't find it easier to just throw the code away and rebuild it This also assumes that the same application build by humans wouldn't become a "spaghetti mess".

fsniper 2mo ago
AI writes faster, so the rate it incurs tech debt is proportionally higher. However it's ability to have large context kept on memory compared to humans is also a key component fighting against it. These are occasionally forgotten when code quality of AI for large code bases are discussed. So Yes I think humans also build spaghetti, but as they write slower they get to the same place a lot later. However humans can't correct it, or can't correct it fast enough. AI can.
- aselimov3 2mo ago
  It does somewhat depend on the application size. Seems to me that for regular software projects (that aren't enterprise SaaS) a good programmer will create better software than Claude. Maybe the dehumanizing way to say it is that humans have more efficient/improved retrieval. The amount of time I see repeat code for no reason, or code/context that has been obviously missed is absurd.
ssl-3 2mo ago
And the models of the future will surely be better than they are today. This stuff is still a very long way from maturity. Sometimes it seems like they're moving very slowly. That makes sense: It's easy to get used to how they work today and it is also easy to forget how much worse they were last year. When we look back and realize that just 4 years ago these tools didn't really exist at all, it becomes clear that the rate of progress is rather amazing. In 4 years, we've gone from "hah, good luck with that crap!" to "little kids writing music-learning games on their own in a few minutes" That's pretty friggin' awesome, and it's not finished yet. :)
- nozzlegear 2mo ago
  > And the models of the future will surely be better than they are today. This stuff is still a very long way from maturity. Since this is Claude, the models of the future might be more expensive, or more locked down, or might decide your 8yo is actually trying to build a cleverly disguised bomb so her request gets silently downgraded to a dumber model, etc.
  - swat535 2mo ago
    People tend to not realize how far these models have become. I remember when they would always hallucinate APIs that wasn't there or make up fields that didn't exist.. those problems are virtually solved now. So with that in mind, why wouldn't AI be able to write better code? The code would have to be maintainable by AI itself (operating based on the assumption that the future will be Agentic Engineering)
    - pessimizer 2mo ago
      > So with that in mind, why wouldn't AI be able to write better code? > Since this is Claude, the models of the future might be more expensive, or more locked down, or might decide your 8yo is actually trying to build a cleverly disguised bomb so her request gets silently downgraded to a dumber model, etc. I have no idea what you're trying to add.
    - nozzlegear 2mo ago
      I don't use Claude, but isn't the consensus right now that Opus 5 is worse than previous generations? I suppose you could just commit to always using Fable and never use Opus, but it > might decide your 8yo is actually trying to build a cleverly disguised bomb so her request gets silently downgraded to a dumber model My contention isn't that models haven't improved or won't keep improving – my position is that the business goals of our American AI firms (Anthropic especially) aren't necessarily aligned with continuing to make those improved models available to the public forever. We need only look at the Mythos/Fable split for evidence of this happening already. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vgpyni/my_opus_5_experience_in_a_nutshell/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vgpyni/my_opus_5... https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vgq0jm/opus_5_after_working_for_an_hour_straight/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vgq0jm/opus_5_af... https://www.reddit.com/r/claude/comments/1vfvdgz/anthropic_losing_aura_slowly/ https://www.reddit.com/r/claude/comments/1vfvdgz/anthropic_l...
majormajor 2mo ago
> This also assumes that the same application build by humans wouldn't become a "spaghetti mess". nah, it reflects on how applications built by humans usually do become spaghetti messes with all the resulting brittleness and unintended negative side effects of changes that result but it probably doesn't matter for a little toy piano app
whateveracct 2mo ago
errors compound
- budsniffer952 2mo ago
  ...Whether you are an LLM or human. And, on average, LLMs write better code than humans. Not you, of course. You write exceptional code with zero errors that never needs rework. I'm talking about the rest of us.
  - whateveracct 2mo ago
    they write code faster too, which means things compound faster. i write pretty good code when i need or want to, yeah. sadly LLM code gives me a headache so the current psychosis standard has made work a bit painful. the codebases are becoming LLM-first human-second so even if i wanted to be natty it's not really viable. might as well spend my employer's money.
- gaiagraphia 2mo ago
  Just like in language learning?
skywal_l 2mo ago
Reminds me of Niven/Pournelle's "The Mote in God’s Eye" where the aliens have a very pragmatic/Jury-rigged approach to technology and everything is more or less improvised. I have noticed this with co-workers also, when you have the ability to read/write/understand things very quickly, you tend to spend much less time on making things tidy, clear and maintainable.
- t-writescode 2mo ago
  But then you end up in a state, 2 years down the line, where every single person that works in that code base haaaates it and adding any new functionality takes weeks or months. Compare that to clean, organized code where patterns and extensibility are established. I’ve seen product manager surprised at how fast a new feature was added when everything is laid out well.
  - spudlyo 2mo ago
    Two years down the line I suspect "persons" won't working directly on code bases they hate. Two years from now, I'd wager that even today's most ardent AI critics will be using them for dirty jobs -- like refactoring ugly, but useful, balls of mud.
    - noisy_boy 2mo ago
      Concern about long term care is being treated as a negative trait. Like that guy who finds faults in everything and just slows things down. The thinking I have noticed is that, moving quickly with sub-optimal solutions is being preferred because it lets the developer and their manager show new stuff quickly. That gets the bonus. You might say that carefully ensuring good design enables speed in adding new features. But good design isn't a one-and-done thing. It needs tending because requirements change and some of those require more design changes, which again need care. Nobody has the patience to even allow sufficient time for the first good cut, forget about allowing that repeatedly. Attention is all you need and attention is what nobody has time for. Also, growing ball of mud used to be another name for employment. How else would you get more headcount for that migration project for a rewrite and grow your empire? With agents, even that is gone. Agents write, agents fix, agents can rewrite too. Mud is fine, it's not like we are cleaning it ourselves. Or at least that is the theory.
sota_pop 2mo ago
Interestingly, I have personally felt this way about projects in which I was involved in the past(written both by me and by others)… sometimes starting from scratch just faster and/or easier.
- conorcleary 2mo ago
  That reasoning is why I worry about the AI endgame ;-)
  - getcrunk 2mo ago
    Man … I never think about or am concerned about the the terminator apocalypse. But what a parallel
    - conorcleary 2mo ago
      I'm sure there are endless Instructables for the big red and silver Easy Button
SketchySeaBeast 2mo ago
Good luck to future models figuring out which weird section of code are bugs and which are features.
OptionOfT 2mo ago
Eh, not really. It's the same issue with porting. You always rely on features you didn't properly articulate.
qsera 2mo ago
>just throw the code away and rebuild it What about all the undocumented "adjustments" ("bug fixes" in a professional context) that were made to make it actually useful?
- axus 2mo ago
  Well first it could write a spec, THEN throw it away :) Like you are supposed to do with a prototype.
  - qsera 2mo ago
    Well it could miss relevant things to include in the spec.
    - AndrewKemendo 2mo ago
      Then you version and update the spec and when you commit you reference the diff in the -m
      - qsera 2mo ago
        That is quite unreliable. I would bet that your spec will be out of sync with the program behavior in no time. The only thing that will work is to have non-llm generated tests. But writing those require thinking, which is what we are trying to avoid. Also capturing every little behavior in tests is exhausting. If you don't like programming, you would also hate writing tests. So chances are that a major part of the program behavior does not show up in tests. So throw it away and rewrite from scratch is a just wishful thinking that the LLM marketing wants you to commit to...
        AndrewKemendo 2mo ago
        I’ve successfully done exactly what is described. You have to actually implement discipline yes. That’s the key hard part. However provided you stick to the discipline, it’s robust e2e TDD’d versioned worked through CI and in production You get out of all these tools what you put in
EA-3167 2mo ago
I think that sort of careless waste is a very human behavioral pattern, but then we are the ones training these bots. ed sp
GMoromisato 2mo ago
I agree with this. Clean code is important today because it helps humans to understand it. Cleanliness is not otherwise intrinsically valuable. Today I don't always need to understand the code. When I do, I can ask the LLM to explain the code or to specify the algorithm in pseudocode or even re-write the code until I can understand it. I think, as an industry, we haven't yet fully grasped the impact of agentic coding. We don't yet know what software engineering is going to be like in 5 to 10 years.
bombcar 2mo ago
You use an AI to make the spaghetti. You use another AI to document the spaghetti. You use the third AI to make a spicy meatball from the spec.
- pennomi 2mo ago
  One problem I’ve found is that AI will happily document the most trivial of implementation details as *immutable product design*, making it very poor at automated cleanup. I have to constantly coax it saying “WHY are we doing that? That’s not a requirement anybody asked for!”
bitexploder 2mo ago
Have better agents rewrite it in the future.
- herbst 2mo ago
  Is this actually what all these horribly buggy "startups" speculate on with their horribly buggy products?
  - bitexploder 2mo ago
    It is the only possible way out. The level of tech debt can only be paid by more agents. But seriously, it is an actual bet you can make and it isn’t crazy sounding to me. Build a world where you have an edge with future models and can survive today.
afunk 2mo ago
This is currently my workflow lol. I will build features and functions rapidly then extract and rebuild into smaller more focused pieces of software. I think of it like oil painting. I’m able to paint over, scrape off and repaint relevant sections without being burdened by the complexity of what has already been painted.

fsniper 2mo ago

AI writes faster, so the rate it incurs tech debt is proportionally higher. However it's ability to have large context kept on memory compared to humans is also a key component fighting against it. These are occasionally forgotten when code quality of AI for large code bases are discussed. So Yes I think humans also build spaghetti, but as they write slower they get to the same place a lot later. However humans can't correct it, or can't correct it fast enough. AI can.

aselimov3 2mo ago
It does somewhat depend on the application size. Seems to me that for regular software projects (that aren't enterprise SaaS) a good programmer will create better software than Claude. Maybe the dehumanizing way to say it is that humans have more efficient/improved retrieval. The amount of time I see repeat code for no reason, or code/context that has been obviously missed is absurd.

ssl-3 2mo ago

And the models of the future will surely be better than they are today. This stuff is still a very long way from maturity. Sometimes it seems like they're moving very slowly. That makes sense: It's easy to get used to how they work today and it is also easy to forget how much worse they were last year. When we look back and realize that just 4 years ago these tools didn't really exist at all, it becomes clear that the rate of progress is rather amazing. In 4 years, we've gone from "hah, good luck with that crap!" to "little kids writing music-learning games on their own in a few minutes" That's pretty friggin' awesome, and it's not finished yet. :)

nozzlegear 2mo ago
> And the models of the future will surely be better than they are today. This stuff is still a very long way from maturity. Since this is Claude, the models of the future might be more expensive, or more locked down, or might decide your 8yo is actually trying to build a cleverly disguised bomb so her request gets silently downgraded to a dumber model, etc.
- swat535 2mo ago
  People tend to not realize how far these models have become. I remember when they would always hallucinate APIs that wasn't there or make up fields that didn't exist.. those problems are virtually solved now. So with that in mind, why wouldn't AI be able to write better code? The code would have to be maintainable by AI itself (operating based on the assumption that the future will be Agentic Engineering)
  - pessimizer 2mo ago
    > So with that in mind, why wouldn't AI be able to write better code? > Since this is Claude, the models of the future might be more expensive, or more locked down, or might decide your 8yo is actually trying to build a cleverly disguised bomb so her request gets silently downgraded to a dumber model, etc. I have no idea what you're trying to add.
  - nozzlegear 2mo ago
    I don't use Claude, but isn't the consensus right now that Opus 5 is worse than previous generations? I suppose you could just commit to always using Fable and never use Opus, but it > might decide your 8yo is actually trying to build a cleverly disguised bomb so her request gets silently downgraded to a dumber model My contention isn't that models haven't improved or won't keep improving – my position is that the business goals of our American AI firms (Anthropic especially) aren't necessarily aligned with continuing to make those improved models available to the public forever. We need only look at the Mythos/Fable split for evidence of this happening already. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vgpyni/my_opus_5_experience_in_a_nutshell/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vgpyni/my_opus_5... https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vgq0jm/opus_5_after_working_for_an_hour_straight/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vgq0jm/opus_5_af... https://www.reddit.com/r/claude/comments/1vfvdgz/anthropic_losing_aura_slowly/ https://www.reddit.com/r/claude/comments/1vfvdgz/anthropic_l...

majormajor 2mo ago

> This also assumes that the same application build by humans wouldn't become a "spaghetti mess". nah, it reflects on how applications built by humans usually do become spaghetti messes with all the resulting brittleness and unintended negative side effects of changes that result but it probably doesn't matter for a little toy piano app

whateveracct 2mo ago

errors compound

budsniffer952 2mo ago
...Whether you are an LLM or human. And, on average, LLMs write better code than humans. Not you, of course. You write exceptional code with zero errors that never needs rework. I'm talking about the rest of us.
- whateveracct 2mo ago
  they write code faster too, which means things compound faster. i write pretty good code when i need or want to, yeah. sadly LLM code gives me a headache so the current psychosis standard has made work a bit painful. the codebases are becoming LLM-first human-second so even if i wanted to be natty it's not really viable. might as well spend my employer's money.
gaiagraphia 2mo ago
Just like in language learning?

skywal_l 2mo ago

Reminds me of Niven/Pournelle's "The Mote in God’s Eye" where the aliens have a very pragmatic/Jury-rigged approach to technology and everything is more or less improvised. I have noticed this with co-workers also, when you have the ability to read/write/understand things very quickly, you tend to spend much less time on making things tidy, clear and maintainable.

t-writescode 2mo ago
But then you end up in a state, 2 years down the line, where every single person that works in that code base haaaates it and adding any new functionality takes weeks or months. Compare that to clean, organized code where patterns and extensibility are established. I’ve seen product manager surprised at how fast a new feature was added when everything is laid out well.
- spudlyo 2mo ago
  Two years down the line I suspect "persons" won't working directly on code bases they hate. Two years from now, I'd wager that even today's most ardent AI critics will be using them for dirty jobs -- like refactoring ugly, but useful, balls of mud.
  - noisy_boy 2mo ago
    Concern about long term care is being treated as a negative trait. Like that guy who finds faults in everything and just slows things down. The thinking I have noticed is that, moving quickly with sub-optimal solutions is being preferred because it lets the developer and their manager show new stuff quickly. That gets the bonus. You might say that carefully ensuring good design enables speed in adding new features. But good design isn't a one-and-done thing. It needs tending because requirements change and some of those require more design changes, which again need care. Nobody has the patience to even allow sufficient time for the first good cut, forget about allowing that repeatedly. Attention is all you need and attention is what nobody has time for. Also, growing ball of mud used to be another name for employment. How else would you get more headcount for that migration project for a rewrite and grow your empire? With agents, even that is gone. Agents write, agents fix, agents can rewrite too. Mud is fine, it's not like we are cleaning it ourselves. Or at least that is the theory.

sota_pop 2mo ago

Interestingly, I have personally felt this way about projects in which I was involved in the past(written both by me and by others)… sometimes starting from scratch just faster and/or easier.

conorcleary 2mo ago
That reasoning is why I worry about the AI endgame ;-)
- getcrunk 2mo ago
  Man … I never think about or am concerned about the the terminator apocalypse. But what a parallel
  - conorcleary 2mo ago
    I'm sure there are endless Instructables for the big red and silver Easy Button

SketchySeaBeast 2mo ago

Good luck to future models figuring out which weird section of code are bugs and which are features.

OptionOfT 2mo ago

Eh, not really. It's the same issue with porting. You always rely on features you didn't properly articulate.

qsera 2mo ago

>just throw the code away and rebuild it What about all the undocumented "adjustments" ("bug fixes" in a professional context) that were made to make it actually useful?

axus 2mo ago
Well first it could write a spec, THEN throw it away :) Like you are supposed to do with a prototype.
- qsera 2mo ago
  Well it could miss relevant things to include in the spec.
  - AndrewKemendo 2mo ago
    Then you version and update the spec and when you commit you reference the diff in the -m
    - qsera 2mo ago
      That is quite unreliable. I would bet that your spec will be out of sync with the program behavior in no time. The only thing that will work is to have non-llm generated tests. But writing those require thinking, which is what we are trying to avoid. Also capturing every little behavior in tests is exhausting. If you don't like programming, you would also hate writing tests. So chances are that a major part of the program behavior does not show up in tests. So throw it away and rewrite from scratch is a just wishful thinking that the LLM marketing wants you to commit to...
      - AndrewKemendo 2mo ago
        I’ve successfully done exactly what is described. You have to actually implement discipline yes. That’s the key hard part. However provided you stick to the discipline, it’s robust e2e TDD’d versioned worked through CI and in production You get out of all these tools what you put in

EA-3167 2mo ago

I think that sort of careless waste is a very human behavioral pattern, but then we are the ones training these bots. ed sp

GMoromisato 2mo ago

I agree with this. Clean code is important today because it helps humans to understand it. Cleanliness is not otherwise intrinsically valuable. Today I don't always need to understand the code. When I do, I can ask the LLM to explain the code or to specify the algorithm in pseudocode or even re-write the code until I can understand it. I think, as an industry, we haven't yet fully grasped the impact of agentic coding. We don't yet know what software engineering is going to be like in 5 to 10 years.

bombcar 2mo ago

You use an AI to make the spaghetti. You use another AI to document the spaghetti. You use the third AI to make a spicy meatball from the spec.

pennomi 2mo ago
One problem I’ve found is that AI will happily document the most trivial of implementation details as *immutable product design*, making it very poor at automated cleanup. I have to constantly coax it saying “WHY are we doing that? That’s not a requirement anybody asked for!”

bitexploder 2mo ago

Have better agents rewrite it in the future.

herbst 2mo ago
Is this actually what all these horribly buggy "startups" speculate on with their horribly buggy products?
- bitexploder 2mo ago
  It is the only possible way out. The level of tech debt can only be paid by more agents. But seriously, it is an actual bet you can make and it isn’t crazy sounding to me. Build a world where you have an edge with future models and can survive today.

afunk 2mo ago

This is currently my workflow lol. I will build features and functions rapidly then extract and rebuild into smaller more focused pieces of software. I think of it like oil painting. I’m able to paint over, scrape off and repaint relevant sections without being burdened by the complexity of what has already been painted.