alt Hacker NewsI always wonder where HNers worked or work; we do ERP and troubleshooting on legacy systems for medium to large corps; PRs by humans were always pretty random and barely looked at as well, even though the human wrote it (copy/pasted from SO and changed it somewhat); if you ask what it does they cannot tell you. This is not an exception, this is the norm as far as I can see outside HN. People who talk a lot, don't understand anything and write code that is almost alien. LLMs, for us, are a huge step up. There is a 40 nested if with a loop to prevent it from failing on a missing case in a critical Shell (the company) ERP system. LLMs would not do that. It is a nightmare but makes us a lot of money for keeping things like that running.
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I would hope that most people who are technically competent enough to be on HN are technically competent enough to quit orgs with coding standards that bad. Or, they're masochists who have taken on the chamllenge of working to fix them
I currently work at one of the biggest tech companies. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and I’ve worked at scrappy startups, unicorns, and medium size companies.
I’ve certainly seen my share of what I call slot driven development where a developer just throws things at the wall until something mostly works. And plenty if cut and paste development.
But it’s far from the majority. It’s usually the same few developers at a company doing it, while the people who know what they’re doing furiously work to keep things from falling apart.
If the majority of devs were doing this nothing would work. My worry is that AI lets the bad devs produce this kind of work on a massive scale that overwhelms the good devs ability to fight back or to even comprehend the system.