Code Quality and Maintenance

Skepticism arises regarding the quality of code produced during short mobile bursts. Commenters worry about creating 'spaghetti code' or unmaintainable projects when working in fragmented sessions on a phone. However, others argue that for small utilities, prototypes, or personal tools, the quality is sufficient, and the ability to iterate quickly from anywhere outweighs the lack of rigorous structure.

While some developers find mobile coding useful for capturing "unprompted ideas" or maintaining existing codebases, others fear it fosters a culture of "slop" that prioritizes AI prompting over genuine engineering problem-solving. Critics worry about a decline in traditional keyboard-based skills, noting that massive pull requests of AI-generated artifacts are increasingly replacing thoughtful, manual development. Paradoxically, some suggest that the physical limitations of a phone could force better discipline by limiting complex nesting, though skepticism remains high regarding the long-term maintainability of projects birthed in such fragmented environments.

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i've seen that work well on existing codebases, but bootstrapping a codebase that way is like pulling teeth in my past experiences.

so it really sort of falls back to what you're doing with the llm. code maintenance isn't novel development, which isn't polishing.

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> A Claude Pro subscription

"Doom Slopping" might be more fitting.

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I think I'll take any LLM slop code over the written-on-phone-by-"developers" slop code.

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There's always an edge case. Speaking of which, here's someone who would really benefit from a hard column width limit and limited nesting that modern programmers (particularly ones using various IDEs) so carelessly violate these days.

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This makes me worry about the future where I will be unable to hire anyone that actually knows how to solve novel engineering problems via programming with a real keyboard on a real computer with their actual brains.

To be honest it is already starting to feel that way.

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I have been doing this with toad and opencode and it is great for those unprompted ideas that pop up while in the big blue room, but not really useful for large projects.

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Yeah but I wonder if there's a structure that can be used to make it useful for larger side projects.

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That’s where VS Code has helped me the most, it provides a lot more model guidance than people realize.

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Most of the slop i witness is the latter. This is evident in huge multi 10K pull requests. The code is just an artifact, while the prompting is the "new" coding.

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