alt Hacker NewsI think it's likely that what you call slop is more often than not "good enough".
One thing a lot of developers aim for in their code, beyond "it does what it is meant to", is something along the lines of elegance (that's my word for it, there may be a better one).
With AI generated code there is no time for elegance. It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason. And that really doesn't matter anymore.
Said another way: AI generated code doesn't chase perfection. It just chases good enough.
Replies
But it's not good enough. We can see this all over industry where even M$ is producing software so bad even calculator is electron app. Slow, poor quality and for any engineer below acceptable
>> It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason
So do many developers. I've lost count how many times a code review had to be rejected or cleaned up because of copy and pasted code and I'm going to admit, sometimes it's just quicker to duplicate a little code and leave a comment for 'next time'.. we've all done it.
.. like this one time I had a PR and the developer created on loooong linear method, couldn't figure out how to share between targets and copied and pasted the same bad code somewhere else. Somehow it got through and when asked why this was on production the answer was 'it worked'.
>> no time for elegance
This happens, your experience in is generally your quality out. But that doesn't necessarily mean there's going to be elegance. I've worked at major product driven companies where elegance took a back seat to getting release out the door.
So you have high slop tolerance.
This is fine, it just means that there's very little point if you're an IC.
> It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason. And that really doesn't matter anymore.
Does it not though? Once maybe, but at scale? All code is tech debt. The more duplication, the bigger context, the more grokking, the higher the odds of making a mistake.
I don't think it's a forgone conclusion that LLM's mean the end of caring about code quality. Maybe not in the same way as before.