As humans we have a concept of viscosity. That resistance, like being in quicksand or a swamp, is how you “easily” identify a code smell, something that needs to be refactored, etc. Part of it is human laziness, part of it some concept of elegance, an itch of being not quite tidy as it can be, etc.

LLM, being a tiresome little helper, will gladly output hundreds of lines, hacks, and what have you.

I don’t think any amount of tests, prompts, harnesses and other “my shaman is a better shaman” will help it to acquire this trait. Some other AI architecture someday maybe — just not today.

And that’s why it is good at what it is and really bad at stuff like code “design” (unless it is a well-known solution being baked in the training set)