llm/5888b8dc-b96e-4444-9c3c-465dde409e92/topic-15-843eee2d-2d71-4a19-8221-200afb6c23d0-input.json
You are a comment summarizer. Given a topic and a list of comments tagged with that topic, write a single paragraph summarizing the key points and perspectives expressed in the comments. TOPIC: Technical debt from AI code COMMENTS: 1. Necessarily, LLM output that works isn't gibberish. Hardly. Poorly conjured up code can still work. 2. Yes and no. Yes, I recon coding is dead. No, that doesn't mean there's nothing to learn. People like to make comparisons to calculators rendering mental arithmetic obsolete, so here's an anecdote: First year of university, I went to a local store and picked up three items each costing less than £1, the cashier rang up a total of more than £3 (I'd calculated the exact total and pre-prepared the change before reaching the head of the queue, but the exact price of 3 items isn't important enough to remember 20+ years later). The till itself was undoubtedly perfectly executing whatever maths it had been given, I assume the cashier mistyped or double-scanned. As I said, I had the exact total, the fact that I had to explain "three items costing less than £1 each cannot add up to more than £3" to the cashier shows that even this trivial level of mental arithmetic is not universal. I now code with LLMs. They are so much faster than doing it by hand. But if I didn't already have experience of code review, I'd be limited to vibe-coding (by the original definition, not even checking). I've experimented with that to see what the result is, and the result is technical debt building up. I know what to do about that because of my experience with it in the past, and I can guide the LLM through that process, but if I didn't have that experience, the LLM would pile up more and more technical debt and grind the metaphorical motorbike's metaphorical wheels into the metaphorical mud. 3. $20 is fine. I used a free trial before Christmas, and my experience was essentially that my code review speed would've prevented me doing more than twice that anyway… and that's without a full time job, so if I was working full time, I'd only have enough free time to review $20/month of Claude's output. You can vibe code, i.e. no code review, but this builds up technical debt. Think of it as a junior who is doing one sprint's worth of work every 24 hours of wall-clock time when considering how much debt and how fast it will build up. 4. > lost their personal side project time Yes ! > moved into management roles Please stop. Except if "coding" is making PoCs. If it's actual code that runs important stuffs in production: either one cares enough to understand all the ins and outs and going into managements didn't cut them from coding, either they're only pushing what they see as "good enough" code while their team starts polishing resumes and they probably have a better output doing management. PS: if you only have half an hour for writing something, will you have 3h rolling it back and dealing with the issues produced when stuff goes sideways ? I really don't get the logic. 5. As a customer, I don't want to pay for vibe-coded products, because authors also don't have a time (and/or skills) to properly review, debug and fix products. 6. Have you evaluated the maintainability of the generated code? Becuause that could of course start to count in the negative direction over time. Some of the AI generated I've seen has been decent quality, but almost all of it is much more verbose or just greater in quantity than hand written code is/would be. And that's almost always what you don't want for maintenance... 7. I feel like I can manage the entire stack again - with confidence. I have less confidence after a session, now I second guess everything and it slows me down because I know the foot-gun is in there somewhere. For example, yesterday Gemini started added garbage Unicode and then diagnosed file corruption which it failed to fix. And before you reply, yes it's my fault for not adding "URGENT CRITICAL REQUIREMENT: don't add rubbish Unicode" to my GEMINI.md. 8. My problem is that code review has always been the least enjoyable part of the job. It’s pure drudgery, and is mentally taxing. Unless you’re vibe coding, you’re now doing a lot of code review. It’s almost all you’re doing outside of the high-level planning and guidance (which is enjoyable). I’ve settled on reviewing the security boundaries and areas that could affect data leaks / invalid access. And pretty much scanning everything else. From time to time, I find it doing dumb things- n+1 queries, mutation, global mutable variables, etc, but for the most part, it does well enough that I don’t need to be too thorough. However, I wouldn’t want to inherit these codebases without an AI agent to do the work. There are too many broken windows for human maintenance to be considered. 9. Worse, you’re doing code review of poorly written code with random failure modes no human would create, and an increasingly big ball of mud that is unmaintainable over time. It’s just the worst kind of reviewing imaginable. The AI makes an indecipherable mess, and you have to work out what the hell is going on. 10. There's been so much pressure to use AI at work. My codebase is a zen garden I've been raking for 6 years. I have concerns about what's going to happen after a few months of "we're using AI cause they told us to." 11. That must be so satisfying. I’ve heard the phrase “code farming” before, but I like the zen garden analogy. If the future is indeed AI, and I’m certainly hearing a lot of people using it extensively, then I think there has to be a mindset shift. Our job will change from craft to damage limitation. Our goal will be to manage a manic junior developer who produces a mixture of good code and slop without architectural level reasoning. Code will rot fast and correctness will hinge on testing as much as you can. It seems like a horrible future. However, it does seem to me that given decades we were unable to build good development practices. Our tooling is terrible. Most of our languages are terrible. Our solution was to let inexperienced devs create languages with all the same flaws, repeating the same mistakes. Web dev is a great example of inefficient software dev that has held the world to ransom. Maybe AI slop is payback for software developers. 12. > The AI makes an indecipherable mess Humans are perfectly capable of this themselves and in fact often do it... 13. That’s true, but the AI can make it bigger, faster, and more messy. 14. In the context of "fun again", debugging slop, finding imaginary dependencies, and discovering unimaginably fragile code isn't fun , even if it's not important. But past bad output, I worry for our creative fulfillment. The old timers are right. That feeling of accomplishment, a keystone of happiness is a product of work. Probably beyond the scope of the thread. 15. Either the projects he's working on are side projects, and in that case I don't see why he would need to use the complex pipelines, just Vanilla JS and PHP still work super fine, even better nowadays actually, or the projects are professional ones and then to ship code written by AI is extremely dangerous and he should have resources (time and people) to do things properly without AI. So, I'm clearly not convinced. 16. Setting up build system and prototyping sure. As a replacement for Figma it’s great. But I would throw away all the code and start from scratch if I wanted to be able to maintain the code in the long term. 17. Going in 2026, the frontend has many good options, but AI is not one of them. We have many typesafe (no, not TypeScript!) options with rock solid dev tooling, and fast compilers. AI is just a badaid, its not the road you want to travel. 18. When stuff was getting too complicated, I looked for ways to make things simpler. Developers have spent decades trying to figure out ways to make things simpler, less code the better, only to throw it all out the window because chatbot go brrrrrr. 19. It’s because business demand speed and shipping over other concerns. We had to fight hard for proper quality controls in the face of the LLM coding assistance boom where I work. These are great tools but they have limits and can lead to poor engineering hygiene quite quickly. It took a major issue being attributed to having too much trust in these tools before we were able to enforce better hygiene with them 20. And now you can generate javascript infested slop frameworks for $5 per million tokens. Such an improvement. And it's so easy to just ask Claude to make one for you, why even bother standardizing anything when you can just use bespoke slop for anything anymore. Libraries and frameworks? Not needed. Just shove everything into CC/Codex and let it figure it out. Write a concise, engaging paragraph (3-5 sentences) that captures the main ideas, notable perspectives, and overall sentiment of these comments regarding the topic. Focus on the most interesting and representative viewpoints. Do not use bullet points or lists - write flowing prose.
Technical debt from AI code
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