The use of LLMs will lead to homogeneous, middling code.

For a few years, yeah. Eventually it will probably lead to the average quality of code being considerably higher than it was pre-LLMs.

Middling code should not exist. Boilerplate code should not exist. For some reason we're suddenly accepting code-gen as SOP instead of building a layer of abstraction on top of the too-onerous layer we're currently building at. Prior generations of software development would see a too-onerous layer and build tools to abstract to a higher level, this generation seems stuck in an idea that we just need tooling to generate all that junk but can continue to work at this level.

It does. I’ve been writing Go for long enough, and the code that LLMs output is pretty average. It’s what I would expect a mid level engineer to produce. I still write code manually for stuff I care about or where code structure matters.

Maybe the best way is to do the scaffolding yourself and use LLMs to fill the blanks. That may lead to better structured code, but it doesn’t resolve the problem described above where it generates suboptimal or outdated code. Code is a form of communication and I think good code requires an understanding of how to communicate ideas clearly. LLMs have no concept of that, it’s just gluing tokens together. They litter code with useless comments while leaving the parts that need them most without.

Do LLMs generate code similar to middling code of a given domain? Why not generate in a perfect language used only by cool and very handsome people, like Fortran, and then translate it to once the important stuff is done?

You might even say that LLMs are not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.

I'm not sure if that's a criticism or praise - I mean, most people strive for readable code.

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