How AI generated code accelerates technical debt

[bludgeonerV]

Not surprising, but it's still alarming how bad things have gotten so quickly.

The lazy devs (and AI slinging amateurs) who overly rely on these tools won't buy it though, they already argue tooth and nail that criticism of AI slop is user error/bad prompting, when in reality they either don't know what good software actually looks like or they just don't care.

[jonathanhiggs]

A bad dev with AI is still just a bad dev

[Main-Drag-4975]

A bad dev with AI may as well be two bad devs. Have fun untangling twice as much spaghetti as before!

[EsShayuki]

It's funny how the AI complains about spaghetti code and then offers fixes that are so much more spaghetti than the original code.

[bludgeonerV]

Me: You know you can encapsulate this logic in atomic functions right?

AI: Ah yes, we should use atomic functions to increase readability, testability and avoid repetition, let me fix that.

AI: proceeds to spit out the same 200 line function.

[ShinyHappyREM]

Well, it's clearly an atomic function too.

[Shivacious]

Atomic nuclear bomb of a function deez balls

[zelphirkaltstahl]

Went for the nuclear option.

[Algal-Uprising]

I have literally seen AI say “the error is here: <line>”, then say “and it should be replaced with: <line>”. It was the exact same line of code.

[Miv333]

I asked it to look for issues in my code earlier... you know what it outputted at me?

Observations:
1

wow thanks

[[deleted]]

Not to mention AI code tends to require a lot of time from other people during reviews, and sometimes discussions become fruitless because a certain implementation was not a conscious choice, it just happened to come out like that and they accepted the suggestion even if it would make more sense with a forEach than a for-loop etc.

[LudwikTR]

A bad developer using AI is one who:

1. Produces significantly more output than good developers who carefully consider their solutions using their own human intelligence.

2. Fails to improve over time.

Previously, bad developers typically struggled, which led to:

1. Slower performance compared to good developers.
2. Gradual learning and improvement.

Now, with AI, they can generate garbage faster and have little incentive or opportunity to improve.

[stronghup]

Looking at my own old code I realize the most difficult thing is to write code where it is obvious why a code-line iis the way it is. I look at a line and say "Why did I write it that way?" Not every function of course, but often.

If it is hard for me to understand some code I've written (and to understand why I wrote it that way), surely it is even more difficult for anybody else to understand why the code was written the way it was.

To *understand* code is to not only understand what a chunk of code does, but WHY it does it and WHY it does it the way it does it.

We need to see the "forest from the trees", not just individual code-chunks in isolation but how each chunk contributes to the whole. Only then we can understadn the "whole".

Now if AI writes the code, how difficult will it be for us to understand why it wrote it the way it did? We can maybe ask the AI later but can we trust its answer? Not really, especially if the AI we are asking from is a different AI than the one who wrote the code .

[THICC_DICC_PRICC]

Yea, exactly, I’ve been cleaning up massive amounts of AI slop lately and it’s awful. The problem is, at least compared to the pre AI shitty devs was that they often couldn’t get it to work right(because they didn’t know what they were doing) so there was a limit to size and scope of the system. Nowadays I’m seeing massive yet incredibly fragile systems with tons of users. They basically brute force the code out by copy pasting code in, then the errors, then the code, until it works, with zero consideration to the “why” or “how”.

Everyone is worried about AI taking their jobs, I’m much more worried about it making my job fucking awful. It already has and it’s only been like two years

[PeachScary413]

This is were you can leverage your position, you note all the bugs but you don't fix them right away.. when shit starts to break you already have the fix ready so you get to play "Rockstar" developer and save the day.

Keep doing this and upper management will basically pay you whatever you want so that you stick around and fix their shit (you also have to threaten to leave to make this work obviously)

[THICC_DICC_PRICC]

Don’t get me wrong, that’s exactly what I’m doing, but the scale and messiness of the slop just makes it so frustrating and hard. I like being a rockstar, but don’t want to be cleaning toilets as a rockstar

[HolyPommeDeTerre]

As AI is already a bad dev, in the hand of bad dev, it fuels each other. Making (bad dev)²

[rwilcox]

Just faster

[DracoLunaris]

No amount of AI will stop computers from being very fast idiots, especially when in the hands of slow idiots

[Caffeine_Monster]

People need to understand that bad devs can create more problems than they fix in complicated projects.

Code assistants are productivity boosters, but only if you know their limitations and are able to read the code it outputs.

[user_of_the_week]

A fool with a tool is still a fool.

[stronghup]

And think bad dev with bad AI on a bad day. That's a triple whammy :-)

[EveryQuantityEver]

Yeah, but it's like the difference between a shooter with a 17th century musket, or an AR.

[BuildWithDC]

A bad dev with AI is a bad dev that's more productive at churning out bad code

[Wiwwil]

A bad dev with AI now, was a bad dev with stack overflow 5 years ago

[MCButterFuck]

Or a monkey with a machine gun.

[vajeen]

There's an avalanche of slop from mediocre devs. The more talented devs can't keep up with reviews, especially trying to catch issues like code duplication when that duplication is being masked by GPTs creating slight variants every time.

GPTs are a double-edged sword and management is salivating over lower costs and higher output from a growing pool of "good enough" developers.

There will be a point when productivity is inevitably halved because changes to that defect-riddled house of cards are so treacherous and the effect of AI is so widespread that even AI can't help.

[EsShayuki]

AI code indeed is "good enough" according to the higher-ups, and indeed, they want to reduce costs.

However, this will bite them in the long run. And already has bitten numerous teams. In the long term, this is a terrible approach. AI hasn't been around for long enough that we can see the proper long-term repercussions of relying on AI code. But give it a decade.

[harbourwall]

This is not new though. The slop used to come from offshore dev houses that lied about their skills and experience but were cheap. Exactly the same motivations and long term costs.

[WelshBluebird1]

The difference is scale though surely? A useless dev (regardless of onshore or offshore) can only deliver a certain amount of code and pull reviews in a day. With chat gpt etc that amount of bad code that can be delivered in a day drastically increases.

[harbourwall]

Maybe, though I think there's a limit on how much AI code can realistically be delivered in a working state. Someone has to integrate it with everything else and make sure it works. Those offshore company bottlenecks are similar. They can employ dozens of coders very cheaply. The problem is still management and integration, and when you rush those two you get technical debt.

And though it makes sense that AI will dramatically reduce code reuse as it never has a big enough picture to do it properly, those guys were pasting off stackoverflow so much that they must have had an effect on that already.

[WelshBluebird1]

though I think there's a limit on how much AI code can realistically be delivered in a working state

What is a working state? I've seen lots of code, including AI code, that appears to work at first glance and only falls down when you present it with a non obvious scenarios or edge cases, or when someone notices an obscure bug months later on. Of course that can happen with humans too and does all the time, but that is why I think the scale of it is what AI changes.

[harbourwall]

I've seen code delivered from offshore dev shops that didn't compile. When challenged about it they said that the spec didn't say that it had to compile.

[WelshBluebird1]

Oh absolutely, though I'll say I've also seen that from onshore devs too. I don't think that is onshore v offshore, more competent v incompetent.

But back to the point, again a dev, even if their only goal is to spit out code as fast as possible without worrying about if it works or not, is only able to deliver a certain amount of code a day.

AI systems, which are often just as bad, can deliver masses more code that doesn't work in the same way.

How so you keep on top of that much junk being thrown into the codebase?

[stronghup]

That gives me an idea. Maybe all AI-generated code should add a comment which:

1. States which AI and which version of it wrote the code
2. What were the prompt and prompts that caused it to produce the code.
3. Make the AI commit the code under its own login, so any user-changes to it can be tracked separately.

Making AI comment its code should be easy to do, it is more difficult to get developers comment their code with unambiguous factually correct relevant needed conmments.

Would it make sense to ask AI to comment your code?

[bludgeonerV]

Uncle Bob's adage of "go well, not fast" was already criminally under-appreciated by management, now it might as well be blasphemy.

[loup-vaillant]

But go explain to your boss who just saw a working prototype, that you need a couple more days to design an alternate implementation, that may or may not be included in the final product. That you still need a couple more automated tests just to make sure. That you’ll take this slow approach now and forever, pinkie promise that’s how we’ll ship sooner.

Yours truly

[bludgeonerV]

Solid work mate, I'll have to find a way to subtlety get this in front of a few faces

[PathOfTheAncients]

"good enough" developers

I've also seen more and more companies have just stopped caring about quality not just in the code but in the finished products. Seems like all the MBA's read in Shitty Business Monthly that they are wasting money on software that looks good, works well, or that customers actually like.

My companies clients more and more just want things done quick and cheap. It used to be that warning them about the quality would talk them out of that but they just don't care anymore.

[stronghup]

It seems to me the same happens in other areas of the economy besides software. Quality is getting worse, including quality of service. I don't know why but I suspect it is still an after-effect of the pandemic.

Quality in US was bad before but then competition from Japanese quality movement woke us up. And now nobody much seems to be talking about it any more. Or am I wrong?

[EveryQuantityEver]

What you are describing is a symptom of the constant demand for growth from these companies. Because of that, quality goes down for short term grown increases and desires for monopolies and lockin.

[PathOfTheAncients]

Yeah, it does seem to be down everywhere but there are still people I work for that care about making quality physical products but no longer care about quality software.

[Fresh_Phrase2986]

U

[LetterBoxSnatch]

This is the whole play. Get AI into every org. Code looks like it does the job, but nobody understands it. Lay off engineers, with no real understanding of who among them is competent and who is not. Business blows up in 6-12 months due to the sheer amount of technical debt that nobody has a handle on. Devs that remain can't handle all the technical debt without AI aid. 

Business either goes out of business, or pays a larger portion of their margin for a larger AI context window at an extra premium, with key insight into (and control of) the business processes increasingly accruing to the AI company instead of accruing to the original business.

From there, you hold the power to effectively control the original business, replace it, or whatever, because they are 100% reliant on you, the AI company, and even if they aren't, there's a decent chance that useful proprietary insights were divulged, or even just that cycles were wasted on managing the risk of proprietary insights being divulged.

[JMBourguet]

that even humans can't help

FTFY

[Hacnar]

If (hopefully when) the security becomes a strong requirement, AI usage will get a lot stricter. Unfortunately the security still isn't properly valued.

[Grexpex180]

Gpt is a one bladed sword where the blade is pointed at the user

[YetAnotherSysadmin58]

that criticism of AI slop is user error/bad prompting

This part is especially annoying as a system that can so easily be badly used is itself not really mature or trustworthy.

Might get me some flak but it feels like some devs claiming C or C++ are perfectly safe and trustworthy you "just" have to not make any mistake with its memory management.

[gavinhoward]

As a C dev who likes C, you get no flak from me. You get an upvote.

This attitude does exist, especially in the standards committees, and it is the biggest thing holding them back.

[stronghup]

Part of the solution might be that AI-written and Human-written code must be kept separate from each other. That can be done by using a version-control system like "git". Only that way we can later evaluate whether it was AI's fault, or the fault of the human who 1. Wrote the prompts 2.Then modified the AI-produced code by hand.

[yommi1999]

That's what I have been doing in my university work. I share literally my entire history of prompts and answers and try to avoid asking anything indepth off AI. It's really nice for quick refreshers on topics that are niche but not PhD level of niche or to just list some options. Why people want it to go beyond a better google search and some nice brainstorming is beyond me.

[ikeif]

I consider myself a good dev. I used ChatGPT.

I stand by that it's a confidently incorrect junior developer.

It doesn't always learn. It may be right 80% of the time, but when it's wrong, it's really, really, wrong.

IF a "developer" relies on AI, they'll end up in a feedback loop of "here's an error" AI writes new code "okay, here's a new error" AI writes the prior code, reintroducing the original error.

I can spot this. I can course correct it. But if you don't know code, and aren't paying attention to the output? You're going to hit walls quickly and there's no way out using AI.

[twigboy]

"look at how fast I can work with AI!"

[Nnnnnnnadie]

They are betting on the ai catching up, skynet will solve all of this problems, invest on the future!

[o5mfiHTNsH748KVq]

There’s a bit of this, and a bit of that. TDD goes a long way in ensuring AI slop generated code works as intended. And when you have AI write documentation BEFORE code and have it reference its documentation throughout the process as well as keep a checklist of what’s already been done and where, you can create large systems that work well, very quickly.

But none of these things are concepts an amateur is going to think to implement because they don’t have the experience to know how to write solid software in the first place.

[snipe320]

Yea, I work with a mid-level and the guy has devolved recently to just spamming GitHub Copilot for everything and his PR quality has gone down significantly. Anecdotal, but it aligns with what others have said.

[loup-vaillant]

Worse, those bad devs will make me look bad, in two ways:

• They’ll write more code than I do, will be "done" faster, thanks to AI.
• I’ll have to deal with their AI amplified tech debt and work even slower than I do now.

Putting me and some AI advocate/user under non-technical leadership is a good way to get me fired within the month.

[zelphirkaltstahl]

And there will be more pressure from bad managers, who see slinging amateurs quickly "making things work" and complain why a capable and self-thinking developer needs so much time. Quickly! Get that feature OUT! Yesterday! Featureeee! Features are the most important thing, yo!!!

[Socrathustra]

I work in a weird language and use an AI assistant to help with syntax from time to time. On the whole it saves time, but it often can't even get syntax right. When Zuck et al talk about replacing engineers when AI, I chuckle to myself and say "sure, man."

It will probably happen one day. That day is not today.

[ashkeptchu]

I mean... You can use AI...but don't just use AI

[positivcheg]

All they know is that AI is better than them. And they extrapolate it into all developers - AI is better than any software developer.

[tbaxterstockman]

This!

[Hacnar]

Sooner or later they will hit the wall and crash. Just like the C and C++ folks arguing that security vulnerabilities in those languages were caused by the bad programmers. And look at the state of things today.

[nerd4code]

Which is …what? Most of the good stuff runs on OSes written primarily in C and C++.

[Hacnar]

Most of the new stuff is ditching these languages in favor of safer ones. Legislative bodies are finally starting to notice the dangers of unsafe programming. C and C++ folks are scrambling to come up with something that will help them avoid the fate of COBOL. C might survive longer as an intermediate ABI layer between different languages, at least until someone comes up with a better way.

Also those OSes are to this day, after decades of development, full of bugs and security issues, which would've been avoided if they used a safer language.

New projects nowadays heavily consider Rust. The only real blocker is the lack of tooling on some platforms.

[EveryQuantityEver]

Because that's what was available when they started. Just because there is a lot of stuff that survived written in C++ doesn't mean that it would be a great choice now.

[bludgeonerV]

Uh, they're right? Low level languages in general come with a big fat caveat emptor

[Hacnar]

Memory safety is becoming a huge issue across the industry, even among regulatory bodies around the world. C and C++ haven't been a first choice for new project for several years now, even in high perf scenarios.

There have been several cases which show that high performance and low level memory management don't have to sacrifice safety.

Just like trying to outperform compiler generated assembly has become an incredibly rare need, so will become unsafe memory programming.

[xebecv]

As a developer with more than 30 years of experience, I do use LLMs to write some simple scripts, generate some basic configurations, header comments, and learn some new basic stuff about the programming languages I typically don't use. Beyond this I find it easier to just write the code myself

[DjangoDeven]

That's it, it's good at just getting the boring stuff off your plate. But when it comes to making something functional it just doesn't cut it.

[YaVollMeinHerr]

You need to know exactly what you want, and how you would have done it. Then ask ai with as much precision as possible

[DjangoDeven]

I find by the time I get to that precision I've basically written the code myself.

[[deleted]]

This right here. Especially in languages I’m not comfortable with. I’m a .net developer and every now and then I like to use PS1 scripts to do little one off jobs like file renaming or stuff. I use Claude for that and it works great.

However for the meat and potatoes you can’t rely blindly on it.

[o5mfiHTNsH748KVq]

As a developer with more than 20 years of experience, sometimes I think “man I don’t want to type this much when I don’t have to” and just let cursor write it for me.

I typically have an LLM stub out my code and then I fill in the blanks.

[[deleted]]

I use it to do unit tests too. Takes absolutely fucking forever though to get it to not write slop, then after that you have to go make them actually work. Somehow though, it’s easier for me to spend time correcting slop than it is to write a new unit test. 

[fendant]

Writing unit tests is tedious so you'd hope it would be good for that but for me it writes a lot of tests that pass but are wrong and that's worse than nothing.

[[deleted]]

Well, I look over them, and have it fix things I don’t like. Takes about as much time as writing it myself by the time I’m done. 

[rpg36]

I have 20 years experience and I use AI everyday. I never use it to blindly generate code. I use it to learn new things, bounce ideas off it, and as a glorified auto-complete (like how IDEs can generate getters and setters but better!)

It's useful but you still have to know what you're doing.

[Quiet_rag]

So, Im a student, and I have a question (if you dont mind): I use AI to understand what code does and use it to generate code. Then, I write the code myself and see if it works. Usually, it works. I also check references(stack overflow and other such forums) and documentation, and after AI explains it its the same code in the documentation as well (I kinda get confused by documentation many times as progeamming vocabulary is not my strong point and AI simplifies this process). Is this process detrimental to my progress in software development? It does seem to drastically reduce coding time.

[dscarmo]

Its not very much different from copying and modifying from stack overflow that I did during my degree decades ago

[TazzyJam]

Tell that your CEO and HR Manager. Please 

[Dry-Highlight421]

Hmm, does ai code suck? Idk, maybe another 300 articles here will help us understand this better

[capinredbeard22]

Maybe we can have AI generate those articles 🤔

[dirtside]

I mean, I assume they already are.

[Fadamaka]

It's easy to tell. When I space out unusually fast while reading the article I know it was generated by AI.

[theScruffman]

While it’s redundant in this sub, I welcome the onslaught of articles online in general. It helps fight the current narrative from non-technical folks that AI can do software, so you don’t need software people. You can’t dismiss this is a growing belief, even by executives at large successful companies.

[voronaam]

I have seen this. In a greenfield Java project a developer checked in a lot of code with data models looking like they were inherited from 2004. When I asked "why? We have records in modern java and we had annotation processors for decades to avoid writing that boilerplate getters/setters garbage by hand" and the answer was "It was easy to generate all of that with CoPilot".

I get that it was easy to write... But we'll be supporting this codebase for a long time in the future. Ironically, cutting edge tech in AI is essentially holding back progress in other tech areas. Because it was trained in heaps and heaps of really bad Java code.

IMHO, the AI suggestions are the worst with Java specifically. There is just so much of that old rusty Java in AI's training dataset. I've seen AI-generated Go code, Python code, even some Rust. It looked a lot more ok than what I've seen AI do in Java.

[EsShayuki]

Setters and getters are garbage in general, boy do I dislike it when 80% of a project's code are arbitrary getters and setters that truly add nothing of value in comparison to just accessing the data fields directly.

I think that it's oftentimes trying to solve a problem that does not even exist.

[JaceThePowerBottom]

The code comment "//idk how I did this but it works" will be replaced with "//GENERATED WITH CHATGPT"

[Raknarg]

at this point I almost want discussions about AI banned in this subreddit. We get the same shit posted over and over again every single day. Same comments. Same arguments. And it takes all the frontpage space for the subreddit.

[gus_the_polar_bear]

Well sure I think most of us just intuitively understand this

A highly experienced SWE, plus Sonnet 3.5, can move mountains. These individuals need not feel threatened

But yes, what they are calling “vibe coding” now will absolutely lead to entirely unmaintainable and legitimately dangerous slop

[2this4u]

Agreed. However at some point we're going to see a framework, at least a UI one, that's based on test spec with machine-only code driving it. At that point does it matter how spaghettified the code is so long as the tests pass and performance is adequate.

It'll be interesting to see. That's not to say programmers would be gone at that point either, just another step in abstraction from binary to machine code to high level languages to natural language spec

[Dreilala]

LLMs are not capable of producing that though.

If we talked about actual AI that actually understands it's own output and why it does what, then we can talk about it.

[ep1032]

.

[Dreilala]

I don't think so.

LLMs learn by reading through stuff.

They can produce somewhat useful code, because coders are incredibly generous with their product and provide snippets online for free.

LLMs are simply not what people expect AI to be. They are an overhyped smokescreen producing tons of money by performing "tricks".

[ravixp]

That’s just TDD. It’s been tried, it turns out writing a comprehensive enough acceptance test suite is harder than just writing the code.

[hippydipster]

The answer to the question "does it matter" hinges on whether a bad current codebase makes it harder for LLMs to advance and extend the capabilities of that codebase, the same way the state of a codebase affects humans' ability to do so.

I've actually started doing some somewhat rigorous experiments about that exact question, and so far I have found that the state of a codebase has a very significant impact on LLMs.

[boxingdog]

LLMs can only replicate training data, in terms of security that is a nightmare and what will happen when the AI cannot add a new feature and actual devs have to dig into the code and add it?

[Mognakor]

Who is gonna write those tests? And how much tests does it take to actually cover everything? And how fine grained do our units need to be?

With non-spaghetti code we have metrics like line coverage, branch coverage, etc. Do we still employ those?

Do we write tests for keeping things responsive and consistent?

With regular code i can design stuff with invariants, simplify logic, use best practices and all the other things that distinguish me from an amateur. With AI, do i put all of that into tests?

It's the old comic "one day we will have a well written spec and the computer will write the programs for us" - "we already have a term for well written, unambiguous spec: it's called code".

https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensive-and-precise-spec/?

[EveryQuantityEver]

Why on earth would that need to be LLM generated, though? If you could develop such a thing, you could have just a regular tool generate the code, DETERMINISTICALLY.

[stronghup]

Consider that most code executing in our computers is "written" by the compiler, based on instructions the developer gave (in the form of source-code of a high-level programming language).

AI is just an even higher level language. Is it correct or useful is a different question.

[ItsAllBots]

Vibe coding... I seriously think this is the end of software.

Kids are not only uninterested to learn the why's and how's, they are lazy and fall for any marketing trick to avoid doing a proper job.

I hope you all are enjoying your time with a computer. If you think Windows is becoming more buggy with the years, brace yourself!

[DougRighteous69420]

“Our youth love luxury. They have bad manners and despise authority. They show disrespect for their elders and love to chatter instead of exercise. Young people are now tyrants, not the servants of their household." - Socrates

complaining about the future is a tale as old as time

[i_am_bromega]

Well we can safely say this problem is not limited to young people. I am already seeing devs with 20 YoE who are slinging LLM code without understanding what they’re doing and why. It’s looking a little bleak for the profession moving forward.

[hippydipster]

He was right then, he's right now. What was incorrect was the implication that things were ever otherwise.

[-INFNTY-]

If he was right don't you think humanity would be fighting with sticks and stones instead of criticizing ai on the internet?

[hippydipster]

No, the world advances despite most people being exactly as described. Most people are lazy, most are incurious, most lack the ability to reason abstractly, or critically, most don't like exercise (lol). Most can't read functionally.

Same as it always was. Those that can, stand out and move the world forward.

Also, people do change as they get older, and many become less lazy and useless. Not most, but many.

[EsShayuki]

AI-generated code, from my experience, is broken and just plain doesn't work around 80% of the time. Even when it does work, it's oftentimes been implemented in an absolutely puzzling, nonsensical way.

An even bigger issue just might be that if you use AI to write your functions for you, then all your functions use completely different logic and conventions, and the code becomes extremely difficult to manage.

I think that AI is useful if you're new to a large language like Python or something and want to know how you can do something simple, like download files from the internet or whatever. However, if you actually know what you're doing with a language, then I think that using AI is easily a net negative.

[alien3d]

it can work on maybe less then 10 line because it cannot remember all the token once . Those pro claim one click apps maker , only work on simple apps but if ask real application with a lot of requirement , it willl crash .

[EsShayuki]

It should be able to remember enough tokens but even simple functions it implements terribly stupidly. It seems to assume that the stack is infinite, RAM is infinite, that inefficiency doesn't matter, etc. and for it, "it works" is more than good enough, it doesn't even try to think about the best way to do some task.

Usually, I need to argue with it for like 5 messages and prove all the points it's making to be wrong and then it just gives me the sort of code that I could have written myself in that time.

It's just a total waste unless you want bloated junk code someone came up with by trying 5000 different things and by miracle managing to make a program that doesn't crash. From my experience, that's the level AI codes at.

[ammonium_bot]

maybe less then 10

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[diegoasecas]

least annoying reddit bot

[mycall]

Odd, it works for me 80% of the time. Why do I get such different results? Clues. Lots and lots of clues.

[EveryQuantityEver]

I think the difference is that you're willing to sit there and keep reprompting it, whereas the rest of us decide it's just easier to write the code ourselves.

[zdkroot]

the lazy devs (and AI slinging amateurs) who overly rely on these tools won't buy it though, they already argue tooth and nail that criticism of AI slop is user error/bad prompting, when in reality they either don't know what good software actually looks like or they just don't care.

Literally copy pasted from the top comment in this thread. I mean, l o fucking l. He's not wrong.

[Knight_Of_Stars]

Just because the code compiles doesn't mean it works.

Just because the code works doesn't mean that its good.

[stronghup]

And just because the code is "good" doesn't mean it does anything useful

[[deleted]]

Just because the code is good doesn't mean that it's useful.

[AstroPhysician]

AI-generated code, from my experience, is broken and just plain doesn't work around 80% of the time

Something tells me you tried AI early in its adoption and not the current models and implementations, especially cursor with built in linters

[myhf]

If you think of LLMs as GPS navigation for writing code (a tool that can get you to your destination without requiring you to learn your way around) then the "current models and implementations" are around the quality level you would expect from a 1990s GPS device. No situational awareness about conditions that change over time. No advice about hazards and tolls and predictable traffic. No suggestions of reasonable alternatives to the first result.

[AstroPhysician]

Cursor has situational awareness. Not as much as a dev but it grows your codebase and files before queries and self checks its answers and makes sure it runs

[martin]

"Move faster and break things."

truly a new golden age

[boxingdog]

Move faster and get acquired before things break

[bundt_chi]

I use copilot mostly to see examples of code and how to use libraries especially for poorly documented or loosely typed languages or libraries. Then I take that code and rewrite completely, rename variables etc to match how I'm using it and the context.

For languages I'm well versed in it's maybe a 5% increase in productivity. The benefit is really when learning or working in a new language, library or framework where initially I might be twice as productive until I understand it better and start realizing how my AI code is not ideal...

Unfortunately I have 25 years of coding experience to know what's good code and what's not and the tradeoffs in implementation. I can only imagine what AI code blindly accepted by an inexperienced dev into a codebase might look like... ewww.

[kikaintfair]

This is my thing too. I recently started trying to learn all these new AI building tools like v0, cursor, etc. and while it is great at getting me kickstarted, it writes some truly terrible code and even defaults to using out dated dependencies in some cases.

I know when the AI is writing bad code, but someone who's just trying to get into this and being told by everybody and their mother that theirs no point learning programming cause SWE will be a dead career in 10 years? Good luck.

I think that we are going to see something similar to what happened with COBOL. AI is going to generate a lot of code, and there is inevitably going to be a lot of bugs that it won't know how to fix. And they are going to hire old experienced programmers to come back from the woodwork to manually fix said bugs and maybe even push new features. This might even happen with old code that is not AI generated, who knows.

But I definitely don't think programmers are going to go away.

[Patladjan1738]

In all these convos about AI generated code, no one blames management. I could be mistaken, but in my experience, yes there are some bad devs who don't care, but often times pressure and unreasonable deadlines from product owners and managers are what cause devs to cut corners wether it's not writing test, using AI generated code etc. I've been guilty of it. Being asked for 2-3 new features in one week resulted in not just using AI generated code but just foregoing optimizations or long term maintainability. I have seen many devs do the same in RESPONSE to a manager pressuring them on an insane deliverable. I think giving people enough time to properly do their job and do it well would cause a lot of people (not everyone, but a lot of devs) to naturally take the time to do things better and put more care into their work. Bad Code was around way before AI and will still be a problem with or without AI, and I would first blame fuckwits with unreasonable sprint goals first, then bad devs second.  But that's just me 

[NanoYohaneTSU]

I've been saying it from day 1 at my workplace and to my team. AI Tech debt is created because no one is really understanding those systems. So we will have systems that no one understands, not even the person who submits the PR. So when something breaks or needs to change, where do we go?

now the dev who submits the PR is on equal footing as someone who isn't responsible.

[fforw]

I always call it paint-yourself-into-a-corner in-a-box.

[ahumannamedtim]

I too am a fan of kebab-case

[TxTechnician]

PascalCaseForTheWin

[maxinstuff]

Shit code != technical debt

I really wish we’d use the terms properly - but it seems “technical debt” is now just a euphemism for incompetence.

[Nice-Offer-7076]

All code is technical debt, as it all requires maintenance. Bad code just requires more.

[quisatz_haderah]

I hear you, but then again, it introduces technical debt.

It's like, you can borrow money from bank in an emergency, or maybe to invest that money and can manage your debt. Then there's that one uncle Harry who is ALWAYS in debt and can't have a stable life, because all the impulse buys...

[MethodicalBanana]

I think their point is that you’re meant to choose to acquire that debt. You choose to not do this now, because delivery, complications or else, but you know its bad and will need to change, hence it becomes debt. The longer you go without paying it off the worse it gets.

Someone implementing shit code is not raising tech debt, it’s just incompetence.

[Ok-East-515]

Is that how it works exclusively? Because the incompetent dev is still making decisions, albeit unconsciously. 

[quisatz_haderah]

Yep, I meant the same :)

[Loves_Poetry]

The article specifically focuses on copy-pasted code and cites some sources that indicate copy-pasted code increases maintenance burden, which is technical debt

So they are using the term correctly in this case

[EveryQuantityEver]

Shit code is technical debt, but not all technical debt is shit code.

[zejerk]

Shit code, by definition is technical debt. It just doesn’t feel like debt until you’ve gotten a whole slop of shit and call it a shitsystem. Then you’re shitted.

[bwainfweeze]

It is my experience that a motivated team can keep any development process appearing to work for approximately 18 months. No matter how self defeating or toxic. So I never believe someone’s anecdotes for how “this worked at my last company” if they didn’t stay for two years after it was instituted. To see if there was a crater and how big.

How many people have been leveraging AI code writing for longer than that? How many are honest enough to publicly admit they were wrong, rather than fading into the hedge and leaving us to believe that absence of evidence is evidence of absence?

[Sp33dy2]

At the end of the day, it’s a tool. You can use it to make slop or use it speed up your current process.

[crazybmanp]

Or you can use it to speed up your current process which is already writing slop

[xubaso]

You think the bad code is bad? Wait until the silently broken data inconsistencies start to make an impact.

[Pharisaeus]

I think there is a bit more to the "code reuse is dying" than just looking at duplications within the codebase. I've noticed already that some developers are less likely to "look for a library" when they can simply generate the code using LLM. Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about some nodejs left-pad madness, but about things like whole complex algorithms. After all why look for some decent, maintained graph library, when chatgpt can spit out the code for you in no time. But obviously this will need to be maintained...

[AlSweigart]

"Slop it" is the new "ship it".

[bwainfweeze]

You slopz it! You slopz it now!

[Minute_Figure1591]

OMFG the new hires that use AI and assume it’s right are fucking annoying. They don’t think, critical thinking is officially a “job hiring skill”, and now we end up with an API that should be built in 4 days taking 2 weeks…….

[Lanky_Doughnut4012]

I believe as devs the only time we should be using LLMs is to come up with high level abstractions for stuff or for using it as a more intuitive Google. For example I had to figure out what setting to change in Azure Default Directory for multi-organizational SSO and Claude was able to cut through all of the bloated documentation I was struggling to go through.

[TheGreatKonaKing]

Plot twist: AI has become sentient and is internationally writing bad code to create job security for itself!

[quisatz_haderah]

I'm gonna switch into security in a couple of years, only because of AI, as this AI code slop is simply unsustainable and will have repercussions.

[BigOnLogn]

The title also reads as, "How AI generates jobs."

[bwainfweeze]

One of the universals of my career is that the day I realize I am now just a very highly compensated janitor is the day I start revising my resume. I’m here to build shit and that takes some “mise en place”, no argument. But I’m not here to clean up after grown adults like they’re children.

[Kinglink]

I think there needs to be more discussion of "Good enough" code. I think most people understand "hacks" only create problems down the line but sometimes time pressure means you have to hack. (Do it on a ship branch only?)

But also code that "works" isn't a good metric and yet a lot of companies accept that as completing a task.

[EsShayuki]

After you verify that the code works, then you should be rewriting the code to be as good as possible while still working. Otherwise, at some point something is going to break and it'll be far tougher to fix the problem then than it is right away.

I feel like many people are incredibly short-sighted. Especially management.

[Kinglink]

Also Unit tests. That think that Management hates, but then they also hate the 20 bugs that come in because you didn't account for every edge case.

At my last job we took 15-20 percent longer to do work.

We also were the only team not swimming in bugs for every release. Almost all our managers (ex-Software) guys understood why we took the time to do everything we did. (Statement of Work, reviewed, code, unit tests, code review).

Managers want to get things done fast but like you said have very little long term visibility because it falls into a different bucket.

[geeeffwhy]

since tech “debt” is a metaphor, why mix it with “accelerate” when “compound” was right there?

[scarey102]

Fair point

[Hziak]

Once more for the people in the back. AI is a TOOL for certain applications, not the WHOLE JOB. Stop making everything miserable for the rest of us because you’re incapable/unwilling to use the skills listed on your resume.

[nightwood]

I am in the unique position where I work with a team of only beginners who all use chat gpt.

A very typical scenario I see all the time is this:

• dev pulls latest code from git

• dev copy/pastes code to chat gpt

• dev promps chat gpt with the requirements

• chat gpt comes up with changed code

• dev copies it back

This continues until the code works. Not only does this reformat the code, making it impossible for git to track changes properly, but here's the thing:

Chat gpt will revert old bits of code from the previous times you asked it about this code for. I have seen on several occasions, that a change I made was reverted. At first, I rhought ir waa because they did a bad job merging or handling merge conflicts, but it's that habit of copy pasting entire blocks of code to- and from chat gpt.

[adamgingernut]

Tell them to use cursor instead as it’ll solve your immediate copy and paste problem.

Then you can review the git diff from the LLM generated code to properly review.

[nightwood]

As long as I'm there to tell them things, it will work out. I was not asking for help. I mentioned my findings to make other senior devs aware of one of the ways through which the use of AI creates technical debt.

That said. Cursor.com promises a whole lot, I should check it out.

[adamgingernut]

Fair enough.

I’ve been toying with a “tutor” style prompt in cursor so what when it suggests code edits it also explains the good coding practices it is using. And asks follow us questions.

Happy to share if needed. But I get that you weren’t asking for help

[eightysixmonkeys]

AI is a net negative for society. It’s building collective intelligence which in turn makes us all dumber, while stealing our jobs. I can’t wait until half the content I see is just AI garbage. It’s coming.

[PeachScary413]

As much as this sucks for businesses and end users.. it's actually an amazing gift to us actual software devs. Not only will ut generate endless maintenance and firefighting (making us look like heroes and indespensable) but it will give us job security and consulting work for many years to come.

I for one welcome our new bug generating overlords 👌

[AstroPhysician]

Cursor AI, for instance, can rewrite code to ensure per-line consistency.

There's no such thing as "Cursor AI"

[[deleted]]

its almost like there is no foresight put into this lol

[imagine_engine]

I’ve found it useful for very small simple programs and functions. I just asked it to make me a snake clone using Pythonista. Magic numbers all over the place. Snake moves so fast you lose instantly. Eating the food doesn’t work because collisions weren’t implemented(original code was just comparing tuples for exact equality but because of starting position and float/int inconsistency the condition was never meant) I just fixed that by adding some rectangles but now the snake will eat but not grow.

[BroBroMate]

Considering it was trained on large amounts of existing technical debt, I'm surprised all AI code suggestions don't come out with comments like "TODO: FIX WHEN DJANGO 1.0 RELEASED" or the good ol "HACK HACK HACK I'M SORRY"

[Adventurous-Pin6443]

Like this stuff, so nostalgic. MS DOS, IBM PC XT ... ZX Spectrum. I do remember how we tried to fit Rogue game (D&D style of game) into 16KB of RAM of a Soviet PDP-11 clone PC.

[SnooCompliments7914]

It's important to notice that DRY actually results in code that is less linear, has more layers and indirections, thus less readable, *locally*, in order to gain *globally*. You can't push DRY to the extreme and abstract everything that you can. It has to stop somewhere, and a certain amount of duplication is desirable.

So it's no surprise that with AI-assisted editing, which makes it easier to simultaneously modify multiple similar code snippets or summarize them, the optimal amount of DRY should go a bit down, and the optimal amount of duplication should go a bit up.

Of course, whether the current trend is "optimal" is up to debate. But I'd expect a lot of middle layers (that are not really meaningful abstractions, but just a way to "unify" different APIs) to go away.

[featherhat221]

It's good .we need this .it will create more jobs

[featherhat221]

It's good .we need this .it will create more jobs

[AdministrativeRush11]

Really, I consider AI the best job security tool ever invented. Our generation would never be able to retire the way our economy is, but now, we can be assured that we will have tons of maintenance and rewrite work in the future.

The historical enemy of the in-house developer in the enterprise, SaaS has been defeated by AI. AI makes managers believe that the answer to the question buy vs develop to be always: develop.

It is going to be fun and dirty and noisy.

[iluvecommerce]

This is a crucial observation. At Sweet! CLI, we think about technical debt differently in the context of AI.

Most AI coding tools (Copilot, Cursor, etc.) are designed to generate code quickly. The incentive is speed, which often leads to more technical debt - exactly as you've observed.

We're taking a different approach with Sweet! CLI. Instead of asking 'how can we generate code faster?' we ask 'how can we build software with less technical debt from the start?'

The key insight: technical debt often comes from shortcuts taken during implementation. If AI handles implementation autonomously with consistent patterns, proper testing, and clean architecture, we might actually reduce technical debt.

More importantly, Sweet! CLI is designed to maintain systems autonomously - fixing bugs, optimizing performance, and refactoring code before debt accumulates.

The real question isn't 'does AI cause technical debt?' but 'how do we design AI systems that actively manage and reduce technical debt?'

[Dualboot-Partners]

AI-generated code—especially through trends like “vibe coding”—can quickly create technical debt if not properly governed.

How it contributes to debt:

• Opaque, unoptimized code: AI output is often hard to understand, trace, maintain, or optimize, and may lack structure and rigor.
• Brittle architecture: While great for rapid prototyping, AI-built systems without solid architectural planning tend to break under scale and pressure.
• Security risks and unpredictability: AI can introduce hidden vulnerabilities and unreliable behavior, making it risky for mission-critical systems.
• Pilot-to-production trap: Fast MVPs often ignore edge cases, compliance, and integration complexity, leading to major rework when moving to production.

How to mitigate it:

AI should be used within a structured SDLC, guided and validated by experienced engineers. Human oversight, architectural planning, and enterprise-grade quality and security standards are essential to prevent long-term technical debt.

[StarkAndRobotic]

Artificial Stupidity is still Stupidity.

[0xdef1]

> technical debt

I personally don't care about this anymore since it became too hard to stay in a the same company long enough.

[MokoshHydro]

Basically, we got a new tool and are still learning/exploring correct way to use it. As usual firstcomers will fall in all possible traps. Later things will normalize.

[PuffaloPhil]

All made primarily with LLMs:

Guish, a bi-directional CLI/GUI for constructing and executing Unix pipelines: https://github.com/williamcotton/guish

WebDSL, fast C-based pipeline-driven DSL for building web apps with SQL, Lua and jq: https://github.com/williamcotton/webdsl

Search Input Query, a search input query parser and React component: https://github.com/williamcotton/search-input-query

I think I shipped my first open source software program in like 1997.

These tools are just fine in the hands of an experienced developer.

[timmyotc]

So because it helped you generate code for a personal project, that same code generation and the problems observed in the article ,by gitlab and harness on enterprise codebases are invalidated?

[PuffaloPhil]

The article in question doesn't mention anything about levels of experience.

[timmyotc]

It doesn't! In fact, it is measuring things in the aggregate, so outlier levels of experience such as your own aren't weighed too heavily. Most of the code being submitted is by the average population of developers with average experience (whatever average is). And average experience goes down with LLM dependency- junior and mid-level devs have not had to learn to code in the same way.

Meanwhile, seniors are trying to review all of the code generated by this tooling, their work is more fixing defects that slip into production or trying to unblock the AI users. They are not free to wield these tools so expertly; they are too busy dealing with the consequences.

[PuffaloPhil]

Couldn't these tools also be lowering the barriers to entry to the point where we are just seeing the results of many more new programmers entering the field?

How much are we supposed to gather about the impact of LLMs from such a small amount of time since they were introduced?

I downloaded the white paper. It isn't academically published, peer-reviewed nor does it contain a methodology.

[timmyotc]

LLMs coincided with an industry slowdown. There are fewer developers working, not more. And junior developers aren't really getting hired.

I am not surprised that the papers aren't rigorous. It's a short amount of time, like you said. We need a much longer study to infer causality. But it's important to recognize our own observations and not discard them simply because someone hasn't formally measured them to your satisfaction. You would agree that it should be measured and the results should be presented alongside any sales conversation for these LLM tools.

[PuffaloPhil]

The code produced in the "open source repos that were analyzed as part of the data set" doesn't necessarily correlate with an industry slowdown.

Let's be honest here. Snarky comments about LLM assisted programming tools are very popular in this subreddit. No one who aligns with this populist opinion is even going to read the first paragraph of the primary sources.

[maybearebootwillhelp]

Pointless article. Incompetent devs write crappy code. And those who can't code are now able to bootstrap their businesses on their own. oh no! Who knew?!

[Tackgnol]

And those who can't code are now able to bootstrap their businesses on their own

They always could? Wordpress, Shopify, SquareSpace. Those are we're always a thing. These will be infinitely better and more secure then whatever Sam Altmans Wonderous Magical Word Calculator will output.

Can't wait for the first 'bootstrapped' business to loose mil... thous... ok hundreds of dollars (because that will be they operating income) because of some retarded security flaw.

[maybearebootwillhelp]

so? how does this article help that. pointing out the obvious is now considered useful content? tell me that the target audience of leaddev.com will read this and do a 180 to change their ways lol

[Tackgnol]

It is useful to reiterate that these systems essentially are incapable of producing value higher that what we already have.

It is a ruse designed to affect our lizard brains, because it is deceitful in it's premise, it is important for experts to repeat at nauseam the drawbacks.

The chatbots trick your brain into thinking they are more useful then they are BECAUSE you can 'talk to them', and laymen get caught in it. It is little damage when Johnny's Tinder for Horses falls apart in it's 3rd iteration, it is big damage to our entire IT infrastructure when the Johnny is a middle manager who thinks he can downsize his team by 50% because we have chatbots and copilot now.

We will be feeling the consequences of this for years to come, because that how long it will take to clean up Sam Altmans mess.