While I agree with you that agentic coding still has quite a way to go and is not always producing the quality that I would want from it, I can say quite confidently that its baseline is way above some of the production code in many applications many people use today. It really isn’t that code before agents was primarily written with taste and beautiful structure in mind. Your average code base is a messy hell full of quick fixes that turned into all kinds of debt over the years.

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jmull 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I took the previous post, with its mention of the ball of mud, to be about complexity.

“Taste”, is used in many cases, I suspect, to give a name the collection of practices and strategies developers use to keep their code and projects at a manageable level of complexity.

LLMs don’t seem to manage complexity. They’ll just blow right past manageable and keep on going. That’s a problem. The human has to stay in the loop because LLMs only build what we tell them to build (so far).

BTW, the essay that introduced the big ball of mud pattern to me didn’t hold it up as something entirely bad to be avoided. It pointed out how many projects — successful or at least on-going projects — use it, and how its passive flexibility might actually be an advantage. Big ball of mud might just be the steady state where progress can be made while leaving complexity manageable.

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noelwelsh 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I think there are at least two factors behind ye olde ball of mud that LLMs should be able to help with:

1. Lack of knowledge of existing conventions, usually caused by churn of developers working on a project. LLMs read very quickly.

2. Cost of refactoring existing code to meet current best practices / current conception of architecture. LLMs are ideal for this kind of mostly mechanical refactoring.

Currently, though, they don't see to be much help. I'm not sure if this is a limitation in their ability to use their context window, or simply that they've been trained to reproduce code as seen in the wild with all its flaws.

	▲	skydhash 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Keeping complexity down is always a conscious act. Because you need to go past the scope of the current problem and start to think about how it affects the whole project. It’s not a matter of convention, nor refactoring. It’s mostly prescience (due to experience) that a solution, even if correct and easy to implement, will be harmful in the long term. Architecture practices is how to avoid such harmful consequences. But they’re costly and often harmful themselves. So you need to know which to pick and when to start applying them. LLM won’t help you there.

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noelwelsh 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree. I do wonder if what I'm seeing is a limitation of the reasoning power of LLMs or if it's just replicating the patterns (or lack thereof) in the training data.

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anilakar 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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