While I agree and I have done more than one rewrite / cleanup of messy codebases quite successfully with LLMs in the past few months, I can assure you plenty of people are still using the latest models to accrue technical debt faster than I thought was ever possible. The model "taste", assuming it has one, does not survive bad instructions

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hombre_fatal 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Like real life, you want to accrue debt strategically.

When you're experimenting, vetting ideas, mapping out the requirements, exploring solutions, then technical debt keeps churn cheap.

e.g. You don't want to overly commit to static types that keep "impossible state unrepresentable" too early on since you aren't even sure yet what impossible state looks like in the system.

So we regard debt repayment as some sort of transformation we'll do in the future that never comes because it's hard and expensive, but not to LLMs.

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gdulli 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People refuse to accept that there's more bad code/behavior/people that AI will empower and amplify than good.

	▲	hombre_fatal 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Because we have evidence otherwise, and even the worst code can be refactored by LLMs. That a high velocity project might accumulate technical debt isn't interesting to me if LLMs can also pay it back or if you can decide to work at a different pace where you polish the architecture as you go instead of accumulating debt. I'd make the opposite claim to you: people really don't want my claims to be true, probably because it robs us of our value and expertise as software engineers. But it's getting a bit late in the game to still be dancing around that pill to swallow.

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efficax 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

the models have gotten very good at doing what you ask. if you ask for changes that will accrue tech debt, you'll get it. if you ask for changes that pay down that debt, you'll get it.