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throwawayffffastoday at 12:16 AM4 repliesview on HN

LLM generated code is technical debt. If you are still working on the codebase the next day it will bite you. It might be as simple as an inconvenient interface, a bunch of duplicated functions that could just be imported, but eventually you are going to have to pay it.


Replies

ymymstoday at 12:31 AM

All code is technical debt though. We can't spend infinite hours finding the absolute minima of technical debt introduced for a change, so it is just finding the right balance. That balance is highly dependent on a huge amount of factors: how core is the system, what is the system used for, what stage of development is the system, etc.

visargatoday at 12:54 AM

Untested undocumented LLM code is technical debt, but if you do specs and tests it's actually the opposite, you can go beyond technical debt and regenerate your code as you like. You just need testing to be so good it guarantees the behavior you care about, and that is easier in our age of AI coding agents.

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2muchcoffeemantoday at 1:31 AM

Are people not reviewing and refactoring LLM code?

bdangubictoday at 12:24 AM

In your comment replace “LLM” with “Human SWE” and statement will still be correct in vast majority of the situations :)

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