7 ms·

There is some sense of rose-tinted glasses of pre-LLM coding. A lot of human written code, particularly at the enterprise level, was of low quality well before

There is some sense of rose-tinted glasses of pre-LLM coding. A lot of human written code, particularly at the enterprise level, was of low quality well before AI automated it.

victorbjorklund 6d ago
Indeed. And not fair comparisons ”look at the quality of this small one-shot Claude hobby project. The quality is less than this major open source project written by some of the best developers in the world”
- marginalia_nu 6d ago
  To be fair the pitch has frequently been that Devin/Claude/Astra/whatever is some sort of superhuman bottled John Carmack that will single-handedly replace entire teams of developers.
  - esafak 6d ago
    And it can -- if an able person wields it.
  - victorbjorklund 6d ago
    Yea, that extreme side exists too. Truth is inbetween. AI with the instructions from a dev that knows what it is doing writes better code than most regular 9-17 devs.
shimman 6d ago
This was always due to pressures by management and the company environment, not the workers themselves. It's hard to blame the people writing code when they have to deal with nontechnical leadership that wants to have a feature factory or never given appropriate resources to solve problems. Blaming workers is always an excuse by poor management.
- Retric 6d ago
  Many people were and still are simply terrible developers. Hand those people an LLM and they don’t suddenly become competent, but they do start slinging more code.
  - shimman 6d ago
    Nah, you're still blaming workers and not leadership. If leadership is okay with not training workers (something American corporations would do in the distant past) then it's not fair to continue to blame workers when leadership is clearly aware of the problem and would rather pocket the money than help workers. These companies pay management more than workers for a reason, if you can't even admit that they are to blame then what are you trying to do here? Just attack workers for what reason exactly? Being anti-worker is a great tell to never trust a person.
    - Retric 6d ago
      I do blame management for letting these people through the interview process and then not firing them. But that’s independent of the fact they exist. Training doesn’t solve every problem, the worst programmer I ever worked with that a PHD in computer science. Everything he made was horribly slow, wildlife overly complicated, and buggy. Worse he wouldn’t listen to anyone correcting his issues. He’d store numbers in the database as strings to be database agnostic etc.
      - shimman 5d ago
        Let me throw a curve ball at you: do you accept the premise that most modern corporations are centrally planned economies under the rulership of monarchies, oligarchies, or general authoritarians? If so, do you think introducing democracy into the workplace would help alleviate issues you care about? You do not like bad workers, management doesn't care. They pay bad workers the same as you, bad workers can get promotions the same as you, you will also get laid off with the bad workers as well; or maybe even worse, the bad workers get promoted into management themselves. How do you want things to change in such an environment? You have no authority to do anything meaningful as a single worker, what if you were given a voice to actually make these claims and have other workers decide what to do based on your voice? Workplace democracy seems like an interesting concept to explore if you truly want to create better environments with beneficial outcomes to all, not just the few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy Or are you just trying to bash your co-workers so you become the next pick me?
softwaredoug 6d ago
I don't doubt that. But humans still need to be responsible for understanding what they're shipping. And IMO you get your best understanding by actually writing some code. Even if you don't actually ship what you wrote.
- baridbelmedar 6d ago
  Let’s not romanticize it too much... A lot of enterprise systems are built by developers copying an old AbstractBeanFactoryFactory from a 2011 stack overflow thread without really understanding it :)
  - clem 5d ago
    And which, in turn, was used to train LLMs without any guidance as to whether it's "good" or "bad" code.
  - pydry 6d ago
    Nobody is. It's the AI slop which is supposed to replace this shit which barely worked with equally shit shit which doesnt work which people are romanticizing. Most of the human written code was slop, but the really fundamental and successful stuff we relied upon and which we didnt want to throw away? yeah, not so much. most of that was actually really good. those EJB monstrosities were routinely swapped out by some saas written in python by somebody who did it properly and werent responsible for a lot of late and over budget projects which barely worked or didnt work.
- FloorEgg 6d ago
  > But humans still need to be responsible for understanding what they're shipping I don't necessarily disagree. That said... Why? I've been grappling with this myself. There is an easy/obvious answer, but I wonder how stable/permanent it is. If you feel strongly about this, are you willing to unpack your judgement?
  - softwaredoug 6d ago
    Certainly the population of people that need to know how something works is much smaller. But even still, cognitive debt is a real, documented phenomenon where we lose our ability to change projects.[1] We also know coding agents tend to accumulate slop in projects over time without some human intervention[2] There's also the concern of whether its a good idea to be dependent on an addictive slot machine run by a trillion dollar company to do your work. 1 - https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/cognitive-debt/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/cognitive-debt/ 2 - https://www.scbench.ai/ https://www.scbench.ai/
Tanjreeve 6d ago
1. People didn’t wear that as a badge of honour though. 2. A lot of it wasn’t. Low quality code/speed serves a purpose for point solutions and scripts etc. That’s not the same thing as writing a core system and if the user doesn’t put any credentials in for an S3 bucket then it falls back to giving information about your own S3 bucket (as I’ve seen just this week). 3. Plenty of companies you can discern the difference between mission critical systems versus “business” systems where if it falls over it’s annoying but not the end of the world.
ramijames 6d ago
Not "a lot of". "The majority of". I've been doing development, in one way or another, since the 90s. I've worked with dozens of teams from enterprises to startups. Hundreds of developers. The quality of work has been all over the place, but the majority was not great. I'm arguing that what people today call "AI slop" is already higher quality than what most developers created historically, and the fact that tests and documentation pretty much come for free now means that the floor has been raised. The quality of AI generated code is not great. Yes, it will get better. It's already better than 65%+ of what regular devs can do AND it is faster to produce, iterate, and release.
- thr1owaway9621 6d ago
  This is off-topic, but I strongly dislike AI written documentation. When I see AI house style my eyes glaze over. Just this morning I reviewed an RFC from a colleague that he said was a spec for a web service. The document had no introduction, no context, it described endpoints for 2 distinctly different services instead of 1, and made no effort to reconcile why there are 2. It was scattershot with details, some of them important, some completely irrelevant. It was replete with typical LLM-ism. Basically, it was a dump of a conversation he had with an LLM. As a document to build shared knowledge, it was nearly useless. The only feedback I could provide was a polite "I do not understand what you are trying to build". But, supposedly, another engineer is already working on implementing this spec. I assume the other engineer just cycled this "spec" into his LLM, and off the two of them went. \o/ They are trying to pull me into their project right now, I stood up some containerization infra for them. But, oh boy, do I not want to join. I looked over their codebase, by LOC the codebase is 35% comments, and a lot of the comments are contradictory, there are dependencies that are not used, there is no tooling of any kind (no type checking, no linting, no PR process), there is no auth (this code is already running in production lol -- they have public endpoints exposed that can be used to scrape/mutate internal company data). Another 30-40% of the codebase is unit tests that test trivial stuff like whether their framework's serializers and ORM work, ex: x=DB.create_x(arg=1), assert(x.arg == 1). At the intuitive level, I do not understand people who say coding is solved... To me it seems like LLMs are a multiplier (LLMs are amazing, sci-fi level shit), but if you multiply a negative number or 0, you get something that is <=0. Making agentic coding work requires a lot of discipline & expertise.
avgDev 6d ago
Writing code at enterprise level is insanely difficult. You are constrained by budget, staff, legacy databases/environments, business rules hiding all over the place, and people. You can't just rewrite everything. So over many years people are touching small parts of the pie. If it works it isn't low quality.
- Dlemlo 6d ago
  The code I have seen and see still, started shitty.
- harshalizee 6d ago
  Yeah, enterprise code has that trope of being enterprise-y, verbose and bad. In my experience, that has always been the opposite. At the big corps/FAANGs I worked at, a single line of change can adversely impact millions of paying customers, so a lot of the verbosity and harnesses exists to dampen the failure modes. Most of the terribly written stuff has always been at startups, where devs fling nearly anything across the finish line, if it barely works the happy path.
- nialv7 5d ago
  > If it works it isn't low quality. then the same applies to AI written code?
thi2 6d ago
That is very true and with llms someone who wrote low quality code can now output a whole lot more code. Maybe in better quality, maybe not.
bunderbunder 6d ago
I'm not so sure that's a fair comparison. So much "bad" enterprise code evolved into that state over years or even decades of small changes. Meanwhile, last year I got to watch an LLM-authored codebase speedrun itself into a similar state in only a couple months. And I would say that the enterprise code was actually better. It at least did its job fairly reliably. The LLM codebase was riddled with defects, so much so that it ate up all our time and our feature delivery rate ground to a halt. There are two observations that really eat at me: 1. Studies seem to indicate that agentic coding uses 2-10x as many lines of code to accomplish the same task. 2. One of the only really well-established empirical results in software engineering is the strong association between LOC and defect rate.
- devin 6d ago
  This is happening all over the place right now. There is a ton of greenfield happening, which further adds to the illusion of speed. Eventually you produce a big old pile of shit that even with the help of the LLM is weird to reason about, and it slows way down. Many such cases.
tripleee 6d ago
Are you saying that pure vibe coding by a non-technical person produces better code than pre-LLM developers, or that experienced dev + AI produces better code? Both of those things are very different, and AI shouldn't be the one taking the credit if it's the second case.
guywithahat 5d ago
I would argue the average code quality of LLM's today is much higher than pre-AI code quality. It's better documented, more readable, and has fewer bugs. There was a brief period where frontier models were still worse than the average developer, but that period among frontier models is well past us.
andriy_koval 5d ago
> A lot of human written code, particularly at the enterprise level, was of low quality well before AI automated it. its just now the same humans weaponized by AI ship 20x more of low quality code.

There is some sense of rose-tinted glasses of pre-LLM coding. A lot of human written code, particularly at the enterprise level, was of low quality well before AI automated it.

victorbjorklund 6d ago

Indeed. And not fair comparisons ”look at the quality of this small one-shot Claude hobby project. The quality is less than this major open source project written by some of the best developers in the world”

marginalia_nu 6d ago
To be fair the pitch has frequently been that Devin/Claude/Astra/whatever is some sort of superhuman bottled John Carmack that will single-handedly replace entire teams of developers.
- esafak 6d ago
  And it can -- if an able person wields it.
- victorbjorklund 6d ago
  Yea, that extreme side exists too. Truth is inbetween. AI with the instructions from a dev that knows what it is doing writes better code than most regular 9-17 devs.

shimman 6d ago

This was always due to pressures by management and the company environment, not the workers themselves. It's hard to blame the people writing code when they have to deal with nontechnical leadership that wants to have a feature factory or never given appropriate resources to solve problems. Blaming workers is always an excuse by poor management.

Retric 6d ago
Many people were and still are simply terrible developers. Hand those people an LLM and they don’t suddenly become competent, but they do start slinging more code.
- shimman 6d ago
  Nah, you're still blaming workers and not leadership. If leadership is okay with not training workers (something American corporations would do in the distant past) then it's not fair to continue to blame workers when leadership is clearly aware of the problem and would rather pocket the money than help workers. These companies pay management more than workers for a reason, if you can't even admit that they are to blame then what are you trying to do here? Just attack workers for what reason exactly? Being anti-worker is a great tell to never trust a person.
  - Retric 6d ago
    I do blame management for letting these people through the interview process and then not firing them. But that’s independent of the fact they exist. Training doesn’t solve every problem, the worst programmer I ever worked with that a PHD in computer science. Everything he made was horribly slow, wildlife overly complicated, and buggy. Worse he wouldn’t listen to anyone correcting his issues. He’d store numbers in the database as strings to be database agnostic etc.
    - shimman 5d ago
      Let me throw a curve ball at you: do you accept the premise that most modern corporations are centrally planned economies under the rulership of monarchies, oligarchies, or general authoritarians? If so, do you think introducing democracy into the workplace would help alleviate issues you care about? You do not like bad workers, management doesn't care. They pay bad workers the same as you, bad workers can get promotions the same as you, you will also get laid off with the bad workers as well; or maybe even worse, the bad workers get promoted into management themselves. How do you want things to change in such an environment? You have no authority to do anything meaningful as a single worker, what if you were given a voice to actually make these claims and have other workers decide what to do based on your voice? Workplace democracy seems like an interesting concept to explore if you truly want to create better environments with beneficial outcomes to all, not just the few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy Or are you just trying to bash your co-workers so you become the next pick me?

softwaredoug 6d ago

I don't doubt that. But humans still need to be responsible for understanding what they're shipping. And IMO you get your best understanding by actually writing some code. Even if you don't actually ship what you wrote.

baridbelmedar 6d ago
Let’s not romanticize it too much... A lot of enterprise systems are built by developers copying an old AbstractBeanFactoryFactory from a 2011 stack overflow thread without really understanding it :)
- clem 5d ago
  And which, in turn, was used to train LLMs without any guidance as to whether it's "good" or "bad" code.
- pydry 6d ago
  Nobody is. It's the AI slop which is supposed to replace this shit which barely worked with equally shit shit which doesnt work which people are romanticizing. Most of the human written code was slop, but the really fundamental and successful stuff we relied upon and which we didnt want to throw away? yeah, not so much. most of that was actually really good. those EJB monstrosities were routinely swapped out by some saas written in python by somebody who did it properly and werent responsible for a lot of late and over budget projects which barely worked or didnt work.
FloorEgg 6d ago
> But humans still need to be responsible for understanding what they're shipping I don't necessarily disagree. That said... Why? I've been grappling with this myself. There is an easy/obvious answer, but I wonder how stable/permanent it is. If you feel strongly about this, are you willing to unpack your judgement?
- softwaredoug 6d ago
  Certainly the population of people that need to know how something works is much smaller. But even still, cognitive debt is a real, documented phenomenon where we lose our ability to change projects.[1] We also know coding agents tend to accumulate slop in projects over time without some human intervention[2] There's also the concern of whether its a good idea to be dependent on an addictive slot machine run by a trillion dollar company to do your work. 1 - https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/cognitive-debt/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/cognitive-debt/ 2 - https://www.scbench.ai/ https://www.scbench.ai/

Tanjreeve 6d ago

1. People didn’t wear that as a badge of honour though. 2. A lot of it wasn’t. Low quality code/speed serves a purpose for point solutions and scripts etc. That’s not the same thing as writing a core system and if the user doesn’t put any credentials in for an S3 bucket then it falls back to giving information about your own S3 bucket (as I’ve seen just this week). 3. Plenty of companies you can discern the difference between mission critical systems versus “business” systems where if it falls over it’s annoying but not the end of the world.

ramijames 6d ago

Not "a lot of". "The majority of". I've been doing development, in one way or another, since the 90s. I've worked with dozens of teams from enterprises to startups. Hundreds of developers. The quality of work has been all over the place, but the majority was not great. I'm arguing that what people today call "AI slop" is already higher quality than what most developers created historically, and the fact that tests and documentation pretty much come for free now means that the floor has been raised. The quality of AI generated code is not great. Yes, it will get better. It's already better than 65%+ of what regular devs can do AND it is faster to produce, iterate, and release.

thr1owaway9621 6d ago
This is off-topic, but I strongly dislike AI written documentation. When I see AI house style my eyes glaze over. Just this morning I reviewed an RFC from a colleague that he said was a spec for a web service. The document had no introduction, no context, it described endpoints for 2 distinctly different services instead of 1, and made no effort to reconcile why there are 2. It was scattershot with details, some of them important, some completely irrelevant. It was replete with typical LLM-ism. Basically, it was a dump of a conversation he had with an LLM. As a document to build shared knowledge, it was nearly useless. The only feedback I could provide was a polite "I do not understand what you are trying to build". But, supposedly, another engineer is already working on implementing this spec. I assume the other engineer just cycled this "spec" into his LLM, and off the two of them went. \o/ They are trying to pull me into their project right now, I stood up some containerization infra for them. But, oh boy, do I not want to join. I looked over their codebase, by LOC the codebase is 35% comments, and a lot of the comments are contradictory, there are dependencies that are not used, there is no tooling of any kind (no type checking, no linting, no PR process), there is no auth (this code is already running in production lol -- they have public endpoints exposed that can be used to scrape/mutate internal company data). Another 30-40% of the codebase is unit tests that test trivial stuff like whether their framework's serializers and ORM work, ex: x=DB.create_x(arg=1), assert(x.arg == 1). At the intuitive level, I do not understand people who say coding is solved... To me it seems like LLMs are a multiplier (LLMs are amazing, sci-fi level shit), but if you multiply a negative number or 0, you get something that is <=0. Making agentic coding work requires a lot of discipline & expertise.

avgDev 6d ago

Writing code at enterprise level is insanely difficult. You are constrained by budget, staff, legacy databases/environments, business rules hiding all over the place, and people. You can't just rewrite everything. So over many years people are touching small parts of the pie. If it works it isn't low quality.

Dlemlo 6d ago
The code I have seen and see still, started shitty.
harshalizee 6d ago
Yeah, enterprise code has that trope of being enterprise-y, verbose and bad. In my experience, that has always been the opposite. At the big corps/FAANGs I worked at, a single line of change can adversely impact millions of paying customers, so a lot of the verbosity and harnesses exists to dampen the failure modes. Most of the terribly written stuff has always been at startups, where devs fling nearly anything across the finish line, if it barely works the happy path.
nialv7 5d ago
> If it works it isn't low quality. then the same applies to AI written code?

thi2 6d ago

That is very true and with llms someone who wrote low quality code can now output a whole lot more code. Maybe in better quality, maybe not.

bunderbunder 6d ago

I'm not so sure that's a fair comparison. So much "bad" enterprise code evolved into that state over years or even decades of small changes. Meanwhile, last year I got to watch an LLM-authored codebase speedrun itself into a similar state in only a couple months. And I would say that the enterprise code was actually better. It at least did its job fairly reliably. The LLM codebase was riddled with defects, so much so that it ate up all our time and our feature delivery rate ground to a halt. There are two observations that really eat at me: 1. Studies seem to indicate that agentic coding uses 2-10x as many lines of code to accomplish the same task. 2. One of the only really well-established empirical results in software engineering is the strong association between LOC and defect rate.

devin 6d ago
This is happening all over the place right now. There is a ton of greenfield happening, which further adds to the illusion of speed. Eventually you produce a big old pile of shit that even with the help of the LLM is weird to reason about, and it slows way down. Many such cases.

tripleee 6d ago

Are you saying that pure vibe coding by a non-technical person produces better code than pre-LLM developers, or that experienced dev + AI produces better code? Both of those things are very different, and AI shouldn't be the one taking the credit if it's the second case.

guywithahat 5d ago

I would argue the average code quality of LLM's today is much higher than pre-AI code quality. It's better documented, more readable, and has fewer bugs. There was a brief period where frontier models were still worse than the average developer, but that period among frontier models is well past us.

andriy_koval 5d ago

> A lot of human written code, particularly at the enterprise level, was of low quality well before AI automated it. its just now the same humans weaponized by AI ship 20x more of low quality code.