alt Hacker NewsI agree with your sentiment here. However:
> if anything, by most traditional forms of evaluating software quality, the projects I work on are better than what they were 5, 10 years ago, using the same metrics as back then.
In this side sentence you're introducing so much vagueness. Can you share insights to get some validation on your claim? What metrics are you using and how is your code from 10, 5, 0 years performing?
I feel throwing in a vague claim like that unnecessarily dilutes your message and distracts from the point. But, if you do have more to share I'd be curious to learn more.
The anecdote the GP is providing there rings true for me too - although I'm not sure if I am going offer better detail.
I'm a proponent of architectural styles like MVC, SOLID, hexagonal architecture, etc, and in pre-LLM workflows, "human laziness" often led to technical debt: a developer might lazily leak domain logic into a controller or skip writing an interface just to save time.
The code I get the LLM to emit is a lot more compliant with those BUT there is a caveat that the LLMs do have a habit of "forgetting" the specific concerns of the given file/package/etc, and I frequently have to remind it.
The "metric" improvement isn't that the LLM is a better architect than a senior dev; it's that it reduces the cost of doing things the right way. The delta between "quick and dirty" and "cleanly architected" has shrunk to near zero, so the "clean" version becomes the path of least resistance.
I'm seeing less "temporary" kludges because the LLM almost blindly follows my requests