A couple of guys at work have been raving about Claude. How quick they get stuff done, how great the code is, how working any other way is a waste of time.

I just had the misfortune today to wade into one of their codebases. It's 60k lines of code for something that should have been simple, and it's an absolute fucking mess. I'm gonna have to rip out most of it and start over just to get it to do what we actually need it to do.

I use LLMs, they come in handy, and I use agents, but this "have agents do everything" nonsense is a disaster, and it's only going to get worse.

On the upside I'm getting paid to fix this shit show.

Devil's advocate: perhaps you are holding a hammer complaining about rivets. If you used AI to interact with the code instead, you wouldn't have to wade through the mess and might have gotten what you needed fairly easily, except you're using the wrong tool for the job

> On the upside I'm getting paid to fix this shit show.

A lot of my career has been this, not due to choice but circumstance. Startups write terrible code, in general. Enterprises write terrible code. I’ve worked with both. If it becomes important enough, someone has to fix it at some point.

Current AI models seem to be job security machines for that kind of work.