alt Hacker News“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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> 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.
Hence "seem". Of course people are not in the habit of describing their process output as "low quality", let alone supposing that that's the point. But when people clearly prioritize speed, and when the result is low quality, it's easy to get the impression of intent.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.