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Comment by briga | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely LLMs are great for greenfield projects. They can get you to a prototype for a new idea faster than any tool yet invented. Where they start to break down, I find, is when you ask it to make changes/refactors to existing code and mature projects. They usually lack context, so they doesn't hesitate to introduce lots of extra complexity, add frameworks you don't need, and in general just make the situation worse. Or if they get you to some solution it will have taken so long that you might as well have just done the heavy lifting yourself. LLMs are still no substitute for actually understanding your code.

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100% agree.

My experience to date across the major LLMs is that they are quick to leap to complex solutions, and I find that the code often is much harder to maintain than if I were to do it myself.

But complex code is only part of the problem. Another huge problem I see is the rapid accumulation of technical debt. LLMs will confidently generate massive amounts of code with abstractions and design patterns that may be a good fit in isolation, but are absolutely the wrong pattern for problem you're trying to solve or the system you're trying to build. You run into the "existing code pattern" problem that Sandi Metz talked about in her fantastic 2014 RailsConf talk, "All the little things" [0]:

> "We have a bargain to follow the pattern, and if the pattern is a good one then the code gets better. If the pattern is a bad one, then we exacerbate the problem."

Rapidly generating massive amounts of code with the wrong abstractions and design patterns is insidious because it feels like incredible productivity. You see it all the time in posts on e.g. Twitter or LinkedIn. People gushing about how quickly they are shipping products with minimal to zero other humans involved. But there is no shortcut to understanding or maintainability if you care about building sustainable software for the medium to long-term.

EDIT: Forgot to add link

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE&t=8m11s

But why follow the wrong abstraction and why try to build something that you don't fundamentally understand?

I've built some rather complex systems:

Guish, a bi-directional CLI/GUI for constructing and executing Unix pipelines: https://github.com/williamcotton/guish

WebDSL, fast C-based pipeline-driven DSL for building web apps with SQL, Lua and jq: https://github.com/williamcotton/webdsl

Search Input Query, a search input query parser and React component: https://github.com/williamcotton/search-input-query

I'm not trying to throw shade when I say this: those codebases are very small. (I'm assuming what I found in the src/ directories is their code.) Working in large codebases is a different kind of experience than working in a small codebase. It's no longer possible to keep the whole system in mind, to keep the dozens+ people working on it in sync, or keep up to date with all the changes being made. In that environment, consistency is a useful mechanism to keep things under control, although it can be overused.

I would recommend everyone reading this to think of it as a skill issue. You can learn to use the LLM/agent to document your code base, test isolated components and refactor your spaghetti into modular chunks easily understandable by the agent.

The greenfield projects turn into a mess very quick because if you let it code without any guidance (wrt documentation, interactivity, testability, modularity) it generates crap until you can't modify it. The greenfield project turns into legacy as fast as the agent can spit out new code.

> turns into legacy as fast as the agent can spit out new code.

This is an important point. Unconstrained code generation lets you witness accelerated codebase aging in real-time.

LLM coding is quite well-suited to projects that apply the Unix philosophy. Highly modular systems that can be broken into small components that do one thing well.

I've found modularity to be helpful in general whether there's an LLM or not.

Easier to test, lower cognitive overload, and it's faster to onboard someone when they only need to understand a small part at a time.

I almost wonder if these LLMs can be used to assess the barrier for onboarding. If it gets confused and generating shitty suggestions, I wonder if that could that be a good informal smoke alarm for trouble areas the next junior will run into.

You are right but that's also a good indication that the codebase itself is too complex and at a certain size / scale, too much for a human to reason over even or even if something a human could do, is not efficient doing so.

You should not be structuring the code for a LLM alone but I have found that trying to be very modular has helped both my code as well as the ability to utilize LLM on top of it.

I've found they will also introduce subtle changes. I just used o1 recently to pull code from a Python notebook and remove all the intermediate output. It basically got it right except for one string that was used to look up info from an external source. It just dropped 2 characters from the end of the string. That issue required a bit of time to track down because I thought it was an issue with the test environment!

Eventually I ended up looking at the notebook and the extracted code side-by-side and carefully checking every line. Despite being split across dozens of cells, it would have been faster if I had started out by just manually copying the code out of each meaningful cell and pasted it all together.

I have seen LLMs do this. This is why I try to create a git repo, even if it is just local and then diff my changes. This allows me to catch LLM changing something that was completely unrelated to the task it was working on.

You can use LLMs and actually understand your code.

I agree, but where I run into problems is my existing projects are large. In the last couple weeks I’ve had two cases where I really wanted AI help but I couldn’t fit my stuff in the 128k context window.

These are big legacy projects where I didn’t write the code to begin with, so having an AI partner would have been really nice.

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