This assumes that the models of the future won't find it easier to just throw the code away and rebuild it
This also assumes that the same application build by humans wouldn't become a "spaghetti mess".
I have noticed this with co-workers also, when you have the ability to read/write/understand things very quickly, you tend to spend much less time on making things tidy, clear and maintainable.
Compare that to clean, organized code where patterns and extensibility are established. I’ve seen product manager surprised at how fast a new feature was added when everything is laid out well.
You might say that carefully ensuring good design enables speed in adding new features. But good design isn't a one-and-done thing. It needs tending because requirements change and some of those require more design changes, which again need care. Nobody has the patience to even allow sufficient time for the first good cut, forget about allowing that repeatedly. Attention is all you need and attention is what nobody has time for.
Also, growing ball of mud used to be another name for employment. How else would you get more headcount for that migration project for a rewrite and grow your empire?
With agents, even that is gone. Agents write, agents fix, agents can rewrite too. Mud is fine, it's not like we are cleaning it ourselves. Or at least that is the theory.
I realize it’s one anecdotal datapoint.
I don’t hate those and hope I get to keep doing them.
I also hope the AI writes good enough tests that I can trust them during the refactor process.
sometimes starting from scratch just faster and/or easier.
You use another AI to document the spaghetti.
You use the third AI to make a spicy meatball from the spec.
What about all the undocumented "adjustments" ("bug fixes" in a professional context) that were made to make it actually useful?
The only thing that will work is to have non-llm generated tests. But writing those require thinking, which is what we are trying to avoid. Also capturing every little behavior in tests is exhausting. If you don't like programming, you would also hate writing tests. So chances are that a major part of the program behavior does not show up in tests.
So throw it away and rewrite from scratch is a just wishful thinking that the LLM marketing wants you to commit to...
However provided you stick to the discipline, it’s robust e2e TDD’d versioned worked through CI and in production
You get out of all these tools what you put in
Just consider this for a minute. If re-writes were so trivial, we would be re-writing software all of the time, even before LLMs. It is the fear of losing all the legacy additions that stop us from doing it.
You just have to have discipline and be prepared to to do the plumbing correctly so that you think ahead of the future dependencies etc… its just doing real engineering
Looks like a change of goalposts.
nah, it reflects on how applications built by humans usually do become spaghetti messes with all the resulting brittleness and unintended negative side effects of changes that result
but it probably doesn't matter for a little toy piano app
ed sp
Sometimes it seems like they're moving very slowly. That makes sense: It's easy to get used to how they work today and it is also easy to forget how much worse they were last year.
When we look back and realize that just 4 years ago these tools didn't really exist at all, it becomes clear that the rate of progress is rather amazing.
In 4 years, we've gone from "hah, good luck with that crap!" to "little kids writing music-learning games on their own in a few minutes"
That's pretty friggin' awesome, and it's not finished yet. :)
Since this is Claude, the models of the future might be more expensive, or more locked down, or might decide your 8yo is actually trying to build a cleverly disguised bomb so her request gets silently downgraded to a dumber model, etc.
I remember when they would always hallucinate APIs that wasn't there or make up fields that didn't exist.. those problems are virtually solved now.
So with that in mind, why wouldn't AI be able to write better code?
The code would have to be maintainable by AI itself (operating based on the assumption that the future will be Agentic Engineering)
> Since this is Claude, the models of the future might be more expensive, or more locked down, or might decide your 8yo is actually trying to build a cleverly disguised bomb so her request gets silently downgraded to a dumber model, etc.
I have no idea what you're trying to add.
> might decide your 8yo is actually trying to build a cleverly disguised bomb so her request gets silently downgraded to a dumber model
My contention isn't that models haven't improved or won't keep improving – my position is that the business goals of our American AI firms (Anthropic especially) aren't necessarily aligned with continuing to make those improved models available to the public forever. We need only look at the Mythos/Fable split for evidence of this happening already.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vgpyni/my_opus_5...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vgq0jm/opus_5_af...
https://www.reddit.com/r/claude/comments/1vfvdgz/anthropic_l...
If I had to guess, the benches aren't measuring what people care about. But you'll have to ask the people in those Reddit threads why their vibes don't match up with your benches, I don't use Claude and don't give a shit.
I love how people have said this for over a year now, and no matter how often I try it, it's still just as broken.
Try it with any task that isn't in the training data. Say, a custom protocol where you need to cross-reference multiple implementations and the specs to really get it, and with no answers on stackoverflow or medium.
At first it's hilarious, but after a while it just gets exhausting. For all these real-world tasks you need to put so much effort in that it's much easier to just write the code yourself, even with the latest (current Gemini) and greatest (Opus 4.6/4.7) models.
If the parts for your project don't already exist, AI can't help you either. And if they do exist, why spend money on AI if the GitHub search is free and you can just fork and modify what you need?
Not you, of course. You write exceptional code with zero errors that never needs rework. I'm talking about the rest of us.
i write pretty good code when i need or want to, yeah. sadly LLM code gives me a headache so the current psychosis standard has made work a bit painful.
the codebases are becoming LLM-first human-second so even if i wanted to be natty it's not really viable. might as well spend my employer's money.
Today I don't always need to understand the code. When I do, I can ask the LLM to explain the code or to specify the algorithm in pseudocode or even re-write the code until I can understand it.
I think, as an industry, we haven't yet fully grasped the impact of agentic coding. We don't yet know what software engineering is going to be like in 5 to 10 years.