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Comment by mellosouls | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty much how permanent staff often have to work with consultants/contractors or job-hoppers in some sectors.

Shiny new stuff quickly produced, manager smiles and pays, contractor disappears, heaven help the poor staffers who have to maintain it.

It's not new, just in a new form.

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I love this analogy of consultants parachuting into a project, doing the bare minimum, and passing the baton to the next person to maintain the mess.

Leadership is buying into the hype and busy turning everyone into overzealous slopmongers. Companies are pushing an “AI Fluency” framework where people are encouraged (read: forced) to use LLMs and agentic coding in every aspect of development.

Don't ignore the difference in scale though. Something happening some of the time isn't the same as happening most of the time.

Yeah, LLMs are easier to keep available ;)

This misallignment of incentives is why we have shitty software in everyday life

What's new though is that now you can do it to your future self!

In my experience, AI generated code is much higher quality than code written by external service companies. For example it will look at your code base and follow the style and conventions.

Style can conventions are very superficial properties of code. The more relevant property is how many bugs are lurking below the surface.

Style conventions have a real impact on how effectively bugs are found.

The actual design of the solution has a way bigger impact on the amount of bugs to be found in the first place

this just means the bugs it creates are better camouflaged

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