> AI has made it very easy to make a lot of bad apps quickly

Is it bad from a user or performance perspective, or just untidy and unaesthetic from a developer’s perspective? Because the developer’s perspective is becoming increasingly unimportant as LLMs become the main readers and writers of the code.

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serial_dev 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

At least some of it (not all of it) will leak from devs pain to users pain... Untidy unaesthetic unreviewed code will sooner or later introduce inconsistencies, poor performance, and bugs, and as you get more of it, the harder it is to clean up properly and get things under control.

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oblio 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> developer’s perspective is becoming increasingly unimportant as LLMs become the main readers and writers of the code.

Until the LLM itself becomes confused by the 10 layers of old patterns that weren't fully deleted from the code base, 5 of which do more or less the same thing but in minutely different ways that cause issues.

	▲	Chance-Device 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I don’t think you shouldn’t go and clean up dead code and ensure that you have code reuse, as it probably does help the LLM somewhat. I just don’t think that it needs to be as strict as we’re used to for human consumption. And the LLMs will get better at both reading such messy codebases and not making a mess as time goes on. Assuming of course, that not making a mess even helps.

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SoftTalker 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Code that is untidy and unaesthetic from a developer’s perspective is also likely to be confusing to a user and perform or scale poorly, in my experience at least.

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bonesss 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Elegance kinda-sorta has to be token efficient in the micro and the macro. Easier & better LLM results.

Aesthetic code is clear & consistent and therefore more readable. Supposedly we’re all awesome at PR review and use an aggressive process of manual review now, so readability should be a priority.

LLMs have context windows and compress them arbitrarily, inconsistent or messy areas of code can be read and improperly weighted in any given session, code base cleanliness gives consistency of generation.

… LLMs or not, I simply can’t imagine making a large(r) pile of crap for myself to maintain & customers to use in their businesses is some grand engineering benefit over time. If those agents are so great make ‘em do the entire job and refactor tested utility into a digestible & defensible product.

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Chance-Device 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think these are separate things. I get the heuristic you’re applying, but with rigorous testing code quality doesn’t matter the same way anymore. Indeed, what is quality?

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FuckButtons 4 days ago | parent [-]

I don’t think any of what you just said is true. Code quality matters even with testing even up to proof of correctness using formal methods, because working software is a moving target and quality is a measure of how easy / expensive it is to continue to track that target going forward.

	▲	Chance-Device 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Well, shrug I guess? You’re welcome to your opinion, we both think the other is wrong.

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SpicyLemonZest 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Both. I debugged an issue a few days ago where a messy, incomplete migration was causing every agent that drove by to very confidently assert the wrong behavior and try to make breaking changes.

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Ekaros 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Depends on how it manifests. If things change every app release sometimes for better sometimes for worse and nothing really stays consistent over time it is clearly bad for user.

Users really like stability of their experience. They want the things that are working to keep working. If something is bit weird but acceptable they expect it to continue like that. Going back and forth between things might be the worst. After bad bugs like data being lost or thing not working at all.

	▲	Chance-Device 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		For sure, but I think solid automated testing is what gets you to a good and consistent user experience. Validation of the outcome rather than the code itself.

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over_bridge 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean that it's allowed more bad apps to be created. It hasn't lowered the quality of apps necessarily but the low barrier to entry means things can be created that don't need to exist

	▲	Chance-Device 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Ah, I see! Fair point.