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0 pointsetothet9h ago0 comments

“A lot of people seem convinced that the point of AI coding is to write low-quality code as fast as possible.”

A lot of people think a lot of things, but I don’t think the majority of people think the point of using LLMs is so they can produce low-quality code. Do they produce low-quality code sometimes or often? Of course. But they also produce high-quality code very often. And sometimes they just a “fine” job.

One of the promises - and there are plenty of cases where it’s met and where it falls drastically short - is that agentic coding tools can help us code faster that is just as good or better than what a human can. One of the other big ideal payoffs is that agentic coding can allow non-programmers to create things that previously required programmers to create.

We can debate as to how successful we’ve been toward the two goals above, but I think it’s misguided to say that the majority of people think LLMs should produce lower quality code.

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batshit_beaver8h ago

> We can debate as to how successful we’ve been toward the two goals above, but I think it’s misguided to say that the majority of people think LLMs should produce lower quality code.

Guessing you’re not at FAANG or similar company. For the last 6 months at least there’s been tremendous pressure from leadership (including highly experienced IC engineers) to let AI take the reigns, assumption being that future AI assistants will be able to deal with any level of complexity and tech debt created today.

Given that everyone agrees that reviewing all AI-generated code is impractical (if you let the agents rip at maximum available bandwidth), and that “harness engineering” is at best immature and at worst complete snake oil when it comes to ensuring system stability, maintainability, and quality, I do believe that it’s fair to claim that most engineers are, in fact, supportive of low quality code generated by LLMs.

Fwiw I do see pushback here and there, but only from the lowest rungs on the career ladder - ICs with enough experience to see where this train is headed, but no ability to save it. Management needs to see the results of their policies first, and that will take months or even years to fully play out.

goatlover9h ago

Hopefully not, but there was recent thread with multiple posters arguing that code quality doesn't matter, and quality produced by humans in the past was often terrible. So who cares, ship it was the sentiment. Let the AIs handle the growing maintenance cost, I guess?

Kind of a shocking thing to see argued on HN. Maybe it's just the vibe coders.

dozerly8h ago

The vast majority of corporate-employed programmers write bad code. I think maybe 10% of the people I’ve come across have shown any interest or care in the quality of code they write.

There will be a large majority of people who hold these opinions, because they weren’t capable of or didn’t care enough to write good code in the before times

sarchertech1h ago

The real problem with these conversations is that code quality isn’t something we have any kind of consensus on.

To a lot of engineers code quality means upper-case C Clean Code. Other engineers are in the Grug brain camp where they think that premature abstraction is the worst kind of code.

But to your point I think the majority of engineers think they high quality code is anything that compiles or passes their (almost definitely insufficient) test suite.

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Kiro3h ago

> arguing that code quality doesn't matter, and quality produced by humans in the past was often terrible

You're conflating two different things. I'm one of the people arguing for the latter, but not because I don't think code quality matters but as a counter to to sudden idealization of handcrafted code.

geraneum7h ago

> We can debate as to how successful we’ve been toward the two goals above

No not really. These are separate questions from what the article posits. The argument is about how do we use these tools, our approach as developers, and if the results are going to be as rosy as advertised.

wavemode5h ago

Eh, I definitely do think that it has become a mainstream take. Not necessarily that we want lower-quality code, but simply that humans shouldn't be reviewing AI code for quality at all - that is, that code quality doesn't really matter and what matters is that the software works.

This is the entire premise of the concept of "vibe coding", and the concept of non-programmers using coding agents. The idea that there aren't large amounts of people and companies doing these things and/or who consider it "the future" is hard to argue.

customguy2h ago

But how do I know if something works if I don't know how it works? By testing (literally) all use cases, every single permutation of of variables? For complex programs there might not be enough time and energy in the universe to do that.

If I know what addition is, I can look at at a line that does addition and reason about it. If I just check "if it works", for all I know, the actual code is something like

    if (thing == 17)
    {
      shit_the_bed();
    }
    else
    {
      thing += other_thing;
    }

Sure, I can use an LLM to check on the first LLM, and then a third LLM to check on the second, and so on ad infinitum, but none of that, at no point, can give me what "knowing what addition is" gives me.

It's kinda like cheap/fake concrete: If you know something about concrete and what concrete is being used, you can roughly tell if it will last, what it will withstand. If you just go by "seems to work", "looks good", you get collapsing bridges and buildings after a few years, during heavy rainfall etc.

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