Syntax and style can be very important, when transferring code.

I’m generally of the opinion that LLM-supplied code is “prolix,” but works well. I don’t intend to be personally maintaining the code, and plan to have an LLM do that, so I ask the LLM to document the code, with the constraint being, that an LLM will be reading the code.

It tends to write somewhat wordy documentation, but quite human-understandable.

In fact, it does such a good job, that I plan on having an LLM rewrite a lot of my docs (and I have a lot of code documentation. My cloc says that it’s about 50/50, between code and documentation).

Personally, I wish Apple would turn an LLM loose on the header docs for their SwiftUI codebase. It would drastically improve their docs (which are clearly DocC).

[EDITED TO ADD] By the way, it warms my heart to see actual discussion threads on code Quality, on HN.

You start to care about standard syntactic rules and enforced naming conventions when you're the one waking up 4 in the morning on a Saturday to an urgent production issue and you need to fix someone else's code that's written in a completely incoherent style.

It "expresses what it intends to do" prefectly well - for the original author. Nobody else can decipher it without spending significant amounts of memory cycles.

Jack Kerouac is "quality writing" as is the Finnish national epic Kalevala.

But neither are the kind you want to read in a hurry when you need to understand something.

I want the code at work to be boring, standard and easy to understand. I can get excited by fancy expressive tricks on my own time.