I don't buy this at all. Code quality will always matter. Context is king with LLMs, and when you fill that context up with thousands of lines of spaghetti, the LLM will (and does) perform worse. Garbage in, garbage out, that's still the truth from my experience.

Spaghetti code is still spaghetti code. Something that should be a small change ends up touching multiple parts of the codebase. Not only does this increase costs, it just compounds the next time you need to change this feature.

I don't see why this would be a reality that anyone wants. Why would you want an agent going in circles, burning money and eventually finding the answer, if simpler code could get it there faster and cheaper?

Maybe one day it'll change. Maybe there will be a new AI technology which shakes up the whole way we do it. But if the architecture of LLMs stays as it is, I don't see why you wouldn't want to make efficient use of the context window.

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csallen 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I didn't say that you "want" spaghetti code or that spaghetti code is good.

I said that (a) apps are getting simpler and smaller in scope and so their code quality matters less, and (b) AI is getting better at writing good code.

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tadfisher 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The Jevons paradox says otherwise. As producing apps becomes cheaper, we will not be able to help ourselves: we will make them larger until they fill all available space and cost just as much to produce and maintain.

	▲	csallen 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's the incorrect application of the Jevons Paradox. We won't get bigger apps, we'll get more apps. Think about what happened to writing when we went from scribes to the printing press, and from the printing press to the web. Books and essays didn't get bigger. We just got more people writing.

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camdenreslink 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Apps are getting bigger and more ambitious in scope as developers try to take advantage of any boost in production LLMs provide them.

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csallen an hour ago | parent [-]

Every metric I've seen points to there being an explosion in (a) the number of apps that exist and (b) the number of people making applications.

	▲	pessimizer 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		What relevance do either of those claims have to the claim of the comment you are responding to? Are you trying to imply that having more things means that each of them will be smaller? There are more people than there were 500 years ago - are they smaller, or larger? Also, the printing press did lead to much longer works. There are many continuous book series that have run for decades, with dozens of volumes and millions of words. This is a direct result of the printing press. Just as there are television shows that have run with continuous plots for thousands of hours. This is a consequence of video recording and production technologies; you couldn't do that with stage plays. You seem to be trying to slip "smaller in scope" into your statement without backing, even though I'd insist that applications individuals wrote being "smaller in scope" was a obvious consequence of the tooling available. I can't know everything, so I have to keep the languages and techniques limited to the ones that I do know, and I can't write fast enough to make things huge. The problems I choose to tackle are based on those restrictions. Those are the exact things that LLMs are meant to change.