It depends on your definition of better. Some businesses value speed above almost all else. Especially early-stage businesses where time to market and test ideas is paramount. I think in those cases, LLMs are better than probably any human.

On the other hand, if you mean tight, performant, simple, well-factored code, then yeah. LLMs simply aren't there, and may never be. On the other hand, maybe that matters less than we thought it did. Time will tell.

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weirdhacker42 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think their major issue is actually naming. I don't think they have issues making well factored code because you can tell them how to factor it. You can even tell them how to name it. But that takes time. People want the functionality now without having to wait. So the well factored and well named stuff is a functoin of how much time you want to spend giving overview. I don't think you're going to have many cases where its faster to type each thing yourself. You can describe the details in a prompt which can be referenced as you review.

The issue is nobody is spending time in review because the stuff coming out "just works". So if no one is reading the code, what is the big deal with naming? The big deal is we need to know what our later sessions are talking about and we need linguistic separation of concerns.

A higher level form of programming, if you will. Linguistic precision seems to be where the specificity can be lost or won. The naming will reflect that with some degradation. But humans will also degrade the spirit of the specifications as well in many cases!

Hopefully this post makes some sense to someone.

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zahlman 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The issue is nobody is spending time in review because the stuff coming out "just works".

People used to be able to write code that was horrible by all the standard metrics but still "just worked" (or at least appeared to). From the stories I've heard, it would get into production all the time, too. But if it's a bigger problem now, then necessarily we know how to fix it, so.

I guess the excitement of the new toy is just leading to some irresponsibility.

	▲	weirdhacker42 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I don‘t know that we know how to fix it so well after the fact, but rather we know how to avoid it which is by writing understandable code the first time round. But we don’t always do that and then things get rewritten and broken etc Welcome to life in software dev 2026, not so different from 1996

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bagacrap 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I don't think they have issues making well factored code because you can tell them how to factor it

I mean, who's doing the factoring then?

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weirdhacker42 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Great point and I think it highlights the issue with talking about this topic because the terminology is so black and white, "AI made it" or "I made it". But the truth is more like I got on a bicycle that I did not build and rode a marathon through treacherous land that I have not been through before, but I have been through other treacherous land before and I had some scar tissue that helped me through this time. Jobs was on the money when he referred to the computer as being like a bicycle. ("for the mind" ... to finish the quote)

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bagacrap 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, I think of a computer as a bicycle and AI as a motorcycle. It will definitely get you there faster, but is it better for you?

Also "great point" is sadly a phrase that has been co opted by sycophantic AI so I can no longer take it seriously.

	▲	weirdhacker42 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Well I’m sorry you feel that way. I don’t see “great point” used often but in terms of its agreeableness I can see how one could take it that way. (In fact I had a feeling someone would say that, but it was a concise wording for what I intended so I left it in). I see it as a multiplier (the bicycle metaphor) and yes certainly getting across town on a bicycle or across the country on a plane is less cumbersome on your health than walking every where. I don’t ride motorcycles, I rode a scooter for a long time doing a delivery job as a younger man and the speed and instability (of two wheeled motorized vehicles) along with lack of visibility to others creates a dangerous combination. And yes I can see the corollaries there to AI usage especially in these days when the excitement of the acceleration is being found seductive by many and without much visibility into the longer term consequences.

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hollowturtle a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Especially early-stage businesses where time to market and test ideas is paramount

To me it's just crazy of how dumb it is to test an idea with a vibecoded shitty app. I'm not saying it should be perfect from day zero, let's pretend we are talking about cakes, how crazy it would sound you will tell people to try and judge your new idea of a cake you don't even know how it taste or what's inside?

	▲	strbean a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		How is this different than testing an idea with a janky, rushed, handcoded protype or MVP? That's how a lot of product development has always been done.
	▲	janalsncm a day ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Well there’s at least two reasons people might not buy your cake: they don’t want cake, or the cake is bad. For the first group, it doesn’t matter how good your cake is. If you spend a year perfecting it, you won’t sell them any more cakes. And for many products, this group is basically 100% of customers.
	▲	christophilus a day ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I agree. You shouldn't test an idea with a vibecoded shitty app. That doesn't mean you shouldn't test it with an LLM-generated, refined, well-tested (by human users) app. I don't think it's a boolean. I think it's a continuum.
	▲	jackb4040 a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Those companies, and those people within otherwise decent companies, have existed since long before the advent of LLMs. Avoiding their influence is a career skill as important as the code itself. And I'm not saying you can just avoid them for your whole career, they're everywhere and are being supercharged by LLMs. It's disappointing that the prevailing sentiment now is that architecture is less important than we thought. Software is always going to be getting more important, and all of it should be well thought out. If these people had these tools in 2004 they might've made thousands of fragmented buggy social media startups and actually slowed progress on that front.