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Comment by swat535 | Hacker News Reader

> long term maintainability

Did business ever cared about this? Like ever?.. I've seen too many code bases with awful code by humans, now AI simply exacerbated the issue but this is nothing new in our field.

I just don't see how this is going to be a battle engineering departments can win. As long as AI is brining money to the business, they are not going to listen.

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LLMs aren't perfect and they have problems, but often they write better code than humans. At least this human.

It seems they run into problems with larger concepts and general organization and need guidance at the moment but for a single code file they often do better then I would have.

If an LLM writes better code than you, that says more about you than anything else (either your ability to write code or your ability to evaluate LLMs). The code they write is garbage.

They write garbage if you turn off your brain. They write code as good as yours if you work together.

I broadly agree with you about improving quality through working together. But even with tons of discussion, they still write code that seems fine from a distance but is weird when you actually get down to actually reading it and thinking about it, line by line. It is not junk but sure as hell I can write tighter and cleaner code and I am a very mediocre programmer. The abundance and frequency of "what, why?!" and "why not just..." reactions I have at LLM code throughout the day has made that much clear to me.

> The code they write is garbage.

This is trolling right?

No. Sometimes they produce code that's ok in small units, but definitely not all the time.

If you write more good code by hand than by agent in 2026 that says more about you than anything else (either your ability to give instructions or your ability to delegate). The code they write is above average.

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