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Comment by CrzyLngPwd | Hacker News Reader

Surely, it no longer needs to be human-readable, and the era of write-only code is finally upon us with the dawn of AI writing our mealtickets.

Why bother formatting 25m lines of slop, and why is AI wasting tokens on making code look human-readable anyway?

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Every LLM I have ever asked about this says they perform better when they receive pretty-printed code because it is easier to see structure and priorities. It has been an almost universal recommendation for me, and it makes sense since LLMs are just mimicking human expression.

you asked the llm? i'm confused

you do understand it can't "know" how it performs right?

You actually think that LLMs are not fed docs on how they work in order to help users interact with them better? Asking an LLM how to use it is based on the reasonable presumption that the company making it will prioritize making it useful for users and work on programming it with its own best practices.

Again, it makes perfect sense as well based on how they are trained in the first place. Look at how they tokenize whitespace and you will see why it's useful. Each number of repeating white spaces gets a unique token (so 2 whitespaces = token1, 3 whitespaces = token2) - so it actually does make a very clear reinforcing hierarchy readily available. And we all know if there is anything an LLM needs, it is reinforcement of important points.

That doesn't make sense.

A compiler doesn't need pretty code to compile; in my tests, when I ask an LLM to deobfuscate code, it doesn't skip a beat.

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