To be fair we've gone from barely capable at writing code to what we have today in barely 3 years. I wouldn't put money on the counter bet that they won't get beyond this hump.

I say this about 30 times a day, to nobody. "How the FUCK is this all so bad? They have unlimited tokens"

Both CLIs are getting worse. I think it's because they keep bolting in unconsidered "features", not because of the code quality.

But maybe being able to code up a feature at the drop of a hat has turbo-charged their ability to make bad UX decisions.

It has pretty rapidly reached the point where I do not think any acceptable LLM-harness is widely available. Every single one I've tried has broken in bizarre ways on even minor updates.

I find codex CLI to be a pretty high quality application. Is the existence of a backend daemon what you're referring to ?

Totally.

The problem is hardly anyone gives a shit if they can pump out stuff that makes them look like they are good at stuff.

Vanity before engineering.

I think the (lack of) quality of these tools shows that software engineering is maturing as an engineering discipline.

We were overbuilding trivial parts of the software like the Romans overbuilt small bridges.

Modern engineering is about making the thing that barely works. If you disagree, learn a little bit about bit narrow the tolerances of modern cars and bridges are.

There is actually even worse code quality written by humans, is that small sample also a reflection of human-driven development? And therefore, the future doesn't look promising that way either?

Seems like its just a bunch of young engineers making bad architecture decisions. Not sure I would blame the culture of vibe coding everything. It might just be bad taste.

The restraint, rigour and responsibility you showed prior to LLMs relates directly to how much of that you apply now that they’re here.

Given how rare it was previously, and how little it was cultivated by shortsighted management, I’m not surprised with all the slop we see today.

The truth is there’s nothing stopping someone from using these tools to remove dead code, simplify project structure, remove dependencies, etc. but I don’t see it happening very often. I have done it a bunch myself though so it’s absolutely possible, it’s all a matter of investment and prioritization.

I'm inclined to agree

i'm personally quite perplexed how sloppy the harnesses are from the leading AI labs, you'd think these are their primary products and would have some human attention devoted to them

it's embarrassing when every claude code release has obvious bugs in it like telling you to upgrade when you're on the latest version or codex opening visible powershell windows for every command that pop up on your screen

like 5 minutes of human testing would catch this obvious shit but obviously they don't bother because vibes are the future and stuff? idk

Solar power has become a real transformative technology and instead of trying to recreate a better world we tariffed them and the execs of this country spent all our coins on power hungry data-centers that write mid code.

I'm sure if you file a bug on the 15k backlog they'll fix it eventually /s

Legit bugs still open 6 months on.. It's a bit ironic