It’s definitely an issue when using coding assistants.

If you are careful and specific you can keep things reasonable, but even when I am careful and do consolidattion / factoring passes, have rigid separation of concerns, etc I find that the LLM code is bigger than mine, mainly for two reasons:

1) more extensive inline documentation 2) more complete expression of the APIs across concerns, as well as stricter separation.

2.5 often, also a bit of demonstrative structure that could be more concise but exists in a less compact form to demonstrate it’s purpose and function (high degree of cleverness avoidance)

All in all, if you don’t just let it run amok, you can end up with better code and increased productivity in the same stroke, but I find it comes at about a 15% plumpness penalty, offset by readability and obvious functionality.

Oh, forgot to mention, I always make it clean room most of the code it might want to pull in from libraries, except extremely core standard libraries, or for the really heavy stuff like Bluetooth / WiFi protocol stacks etc.

I find a lot of library type code ends up withering away with successive cleanup passes, because it wasn’t really necessary just cognitively easier to implement a prototype. With refinement, the functionality ends up burrowing in, often becoming part of the data structure where it really belonged in the first place.