alt Hacker NewsI think there are at least two factors behind ye olde ball of mud that LLMs should be able to help with:
1. Lack of knowledge of existing conventions, usually caused by churn of developers working on a project. LLMs read very quickly.
2. Cost of refactoring existing code to meet current best practices / current conception of architecture. LLMs are ideal for this kind of mostly mechanical refactoring.
Currently, though, they don't see to be much help. I'm not sure if this is a limitation in their ability to use their context window, or simply that they've been trained to reproduce code as seen in the wild with all its flaws.
Keeping complexity down is always a conscious act. Because you need to go past the scope of the current problem and start to think about how it affects the whole project. It’s not a matter of convention, nor refactoring. It’s mostly prescience (due to experience) that a solution, even if correct and easy to implement, will be harmful in the long term.
Architecture practices is how to avoid such harmful consequences. But they’re costly and often harmful themselves. So you need to know which to pick and when to start applying them. LLM won’t help you there.