Why would “messy” code be garbage? Also LLMs do a great job even today at assessing what code is trying to do and/or asking you for more context. I think the article is well balanced though: it’s probably worth it for the next few months to try to help the agent out a bit with code quality and high level guidance on coding practices. But as OP says this is clearly temporary.

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iterateoften 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The definitions of what is messy or clean will change will llms…

But there will always be a spectrum of structures that are better for the llm to code with, and coding with less optimal patterns will have negative feedback effects as the loop goes on.

	▲	aspenmartin 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I agree with you but you can dedicate tokens to fixing the bad code that agents do today. I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying. I think the practical implication is instead of pain and jira we’ll just have dedicated audit and refactor token budgets.

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SpicyLemonZest 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm dealing with a situation right now where a critical mass of "messy" code means that nobody, human or LLM, can understand what it is trying to do or how a straightforward user-specified update should be applied to the underlying domain objects. Multiple proposed semantics have failed so far.

	▲	tracker1 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		On the plus side.. AI is pretty good at creating (often excessive) tests around a given codebase in order to (re)implement the utility using different backends or structures. The one thing to look out for is that the agent does NOT try to change a failing test, where the test is valid, but the code isn't.