alt Hacker NewsTake a look at a sufficiently old random internal repo which was not written with LLMs and compare.
My observation is that they are equally bad and hard to maintain or even more so than the new ones.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the LLM assisted ones have a lot more comments which is nice but take more time to read.
Replies
otabdeveloper4 • yesterday at 12:11 PM
Yes, LLMs generate technical debt.
And they do it faster than any human developer.
I recognize that I seem to be an above-average developer and so my standards for LLM output are higher. I'm seeing enough comments where people are comparing LLM output to offshore dev output or even onshore mid-level or junior-level output. I guess my response would be something like "why are we celebrating this as a huge success for mankind?" If we dump obscene amounts of electricity and silicon into datacenters, we can produce mediocre or "adequate" software engineers?
I agree that LLM output tends to be absolutely flooded with comments. I think it helps to quickly see "is the output what I expected, does it do everything it should be doing in this method?" but I also think most people don't bother reading the comments.