are LLM codebases not messy?

Claude by default, unless I tell it not to, will write stuff like:

    // we need something to be true
    somethingPasses = something()
    if (!somethingPasses) {
        return false
    }

    // we need somethingElse to be true
    somethingElsePasses = somethingElse()
    if (!somethingElsePasses) {
        return false
    }

    return true

instead of the very simple boolean logic that could express this in one line, with the "this code does what it obviously does" comments added all over the place.

generally unless you tell it not to, it does things in very verbose ways that most humans would never do, and since there's an infinite number of ways that it can invent absurd verbosity, it is hard to preemptively prompt against all of them.

to be clear, I am getting a huge amount of value out of it for executing a bunch of large refactors and "modernization" of a (really) big legacy codebase at scale and in parallel. but it's not outputting the sort of code that I see when someone prompts it "build a new feature ...", and a big part of my prompts is screaming at it not to do certain things or to refuse the task if it at any point becomes unsure.