I did this, but now I have a useful piece of software that I have zero clue regarding how it works. My only chance of "maintaining" it is giving it to another LLM to explain.

I am happy that I have a useful tool, but it simply isn't maintainable without a machine or me investing much time to understand it.

I don't see how the former is a sensible future for humanity. I am happy to say I won't be releasing this software I've created (I will find it useful myself), but deferring all understanding to a black box seems a poor future for brain activity.

I've done this, and always get subpar results. I cant get the LLM to make the minor tweaks I want to see, and now I have no mental model of the code to make the fix myself. Sometimes they arent minor things.

Ridiculous suggestion. If someone already takes issue with ai generated code (as well they should, it often is _still_ pretty bad), getting them to write more of it is useless.

Additionally, do you really believe that 'Now is the cheapest time it will ever be to experiment'? Why so? Because of token prices? Not a good omen if so.

I have done this. It's exactly the reason I went back to doing code review. I don't look at the code with a fine toothed comb, but it does help me catch bad patterns early.

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Is it responsible to move slowly when your competitors are moving quickly? Depends on how your competitors perform. If they perform well, then your "responsibility" suddenly becomes your extinction.

People saying this are telling on themselves that they have no idea what quality code is. It's not about looking pretty or nice variable names.

Code quality matters to AI just as much as it did to people

Literally 50 years of engineering history and culture cares about whether code is good. There are libraries worth of books about it, not as a means to an app but for its own beauty. Just read “The Elements of Programming Style”, for example.

Do what you want, write apps with AI and don’t review code, it doesn’t impact me. The claim that no one cares about good code is demonstrably false, and that’s all I’m objecting to.

Not true, LLM’s will struggle with badly organized and designed large codebases just the same, though likely with less errors and profanities.

> No one cares about good code. It’s a means to an end.

I do, my coworkers do, my friends do, etc etc.

Good code is a means to the end of the code being error (and vulnerability) free, maintainable and performant.

And if people are not looking it, those people don't care about their customers.

The way you phrase it makes me realize its almost like a GPL contamination. Eg, once you pull in GPL code, your project is infected and can never use a BSD (or other GPL incompatible) license.

Similarly, once you pull in terrible AI slop code, the project becomes unmaintainable by humans and you need to maintain it with AI.

No code is error free. All code will need a fix of some kind eventually. When it does, it's better that the internals are not a total mess. In the same way that you don't want the insides of your car to be total alien nonsense either.

Code that isn't duplicated in 15 places, that doesn't read the whole database to fetch just 1 record, that doesn't do 15 database reads where one would suffice, that uses an optimized algorithm instead of an exponential one recreated badly from scratch... all that is also good code, and is just as important in LLM-slop era.