legacy code is a problem regardless of who wrote it. Humans have been writing suboptimal, hard-to-maintain code for decades. At least with LLMs, we have the opportunity to design and implement better coding standards and review processes from the start.
let's be real, most of the code written by humans is not exactly a paragon of elegance and maintainability either. I've seen my fair share of 'accidentally quadratic algorithms' and 'subtly wrong code that looks right' written by humans. At least with LLMs, we can identify and address these issues more systematically.
As for 'un-idiomatic use of programming language features', isn't that just a matter of training the LLM on a more diverse set of coding styles and idioms? It's not like humans have a monopoly on good coding practices.
So, instead of throwing up our hands, why not try to address these issues head-on and see if we can create a better future for software development?
We will yearn for the pre-GPT years at some point, like we yearn for the internet of the late 90s/early 2000s. Not for a while though. We're going through the early phases of GPT today, so it hasn't been taken over by the traditional power players yet.
Which is how we ended up here, which I guess is tolerable, where a webpage with a bit of styling and a table uses up 200MB of RAM.