Agreed. I think a core problem is many developers (on HN) don't realise how "bad" so much human written code is.
I've seen unbelievably complex logistics logic coded in... WordPress templates and plugins to take a random example. Actually virtually impossible to figure out - but AI can actually extract all the logic pretty well now.
finally the right question! I would upvote you 1,000 times if I could!
this is why they need a senior/seasoned developer behind them. for things that can simply be learned directly (e.g. from man/docs) it rocks, without guidance. for other things it needs guidance
there are many millions of people writing code… that’s way too many to get any good quality. you might get lucky and get involved with codebase which does not make you dizzy (or outright sick) but most of us are not that lucky
certainly not more of it now, we have decades and decades of human-written code if I am understanding the question correctly.
all's I am saying is that "anti-AI" HN crowd literally glorifies human-written code every second of every day here, "AI slop this, AI code unmaintainable that..." I have been a contractor for many years now and usually brought on to fix shit and human-written code is in vast majority of cases much worse compared to AI generated code. the sample size of the latter is smaller but my general argument remains. I think people that write these "AI slop" comments should pick their favorite language/framework/... and then go to github and browse through codebases, written by humans (ignore commits before xxxxxx) and then see if they like what they see :)
From my own experience (having maintained legacy human codebases and now and then toying around with LLM coding) there's a quite fundamental difference between the types of slop, though.
Bad human code often has antipatterns, missing sanity checks, terrible data structures, bad naming, convoluted flows, etc. but you can usually deduce the intent behind the code. It's pretty obvious where it's bad and why. And if you can get to the mental model that guided the development, you can figure out how to rewrite it.
LLM code has all of those problems, but on top of that, there's no underlying mental model to deduce, much less a consistent one. This, in my experience, makes the slop go from horrible but possible to fix and refactor, to beyond repair and in need of not just a complete rewrite, but an entire new architecture from scratch.
