alt Hacker News> LLMs aren’t lazy. They don’t cut corners because a simpler solution feels good enough. If they know how to solve something thoroughly, they will.
I don't know why they think this, but no? Perhaps it's badly expressed, but LLMs cut corners all the time. It's sort of their core fault really.
Anyway, I disagree with the core premise[1]. Re-writes are not cheap, because 1) code can be so bad it's unclear how to rewrite it[2], b) code can be so significant it's challenging to rewrite it (architectural choices, schemas, etc), and lastly if you're ever wanting to own your own code and not rent it from LLM companies, having it understandable by a human is still a goal worth working toward.
[1] To be fair, I think OP _might_ be talking about rewriting in the moment of the thing being built, but with some unspoken rule that once they think the change is good enough, then they are reviewing all the code? They don't make it clear..
[2] it's not even that hard. Write a test that exercises an end result and not the rule that causes that end result and 6 months later you've forgotten why the code is like that. I had to maintain a piece of software once where the primary form of tests were a bunch of snapshots of an end report being generated, based on some initial data input, mostly all unlabeled. The code was like "do this SQL query on table A and then take the second result". Why the second result? Your guess is as good as mine! I couldn't even work out why they were querying table A and not table B...
> I don't know why they think this, but no? Perhaps it's badly expressed, but LLMs cut corners all the time. It's sort of their core fault really.
I think this is a matter of perspective about what counts as "cutting corners".
I think they look like you describe only because they have limited competence; this is on the basis that when I asked one to make a fusion reactor simulator (to see if it could) by using open source plasma physics libraries which it had itself suggested at the start of this process (e.g. WarpX), it didn't take the "lazy" option of actually using those libraries, it tried to write its own plasma physics simulation from scratch "as a fallback if we can't install the libraries".
As it was not sufficiently competent, the resulting "simulator" was hilariously wildly unphysical.
Would have been much better if it had been lazy.
To your deeper point: I agree. In this case it made so much of a mess that there was no point trying to rescue it; as it was done from scratch, throwing it away and starting again was fine*, but if this had been pushing commits that got interleaved with real work on the main branch of an existing project it would have been a serious issue.
* or in my case, not even bothering to start again. Like I said, this was done to see if it could.