alt Hacker NewsCoding agents have been better than the average "enterprise" programmer for a while now and nobody wants to admit it or talk about it. I have never seen an agent output an implementation called FooImpl that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file, but I have seen plenty of human code like this.
People call coding agents bad because they don't know the asinine meaningless conventions at their particular company while they themselves write awful abstractions and brittle tightly coupled systems, but hey, at least they know how to write a for loop how their particular company likes.
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Yesterday Claude wanted to add a position column to what is a slightly extended many-many relation table. It did this to "make ordering stable".
An average enterprise developer would never add bloat like that up-front, unless if the ability to change the order was a requirement.
Obviously a stable order can be easily derived from the ID or a creation time (if available).
Setting a position however requires extra steps to ensure the integrity of the sequence.
I see things like that all the time, and it's always stuff that grows the code base and adds unnecessary complexity.
> I have never seen an agent output an implementation called FooImpl that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file, but I have seen plenty of human code like this.
And how long does it take a coding agent to output a thousand lines of code versus a human? The worst human at any company was rate limited by themselves. Those 'average enterprise' programmers aren't going away, they're the ones now spending tens of thousands on coding agents and filling your codebase with even more garbage without bothering to review an iota of it.
> that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file
Why is this worse than splitting it across 1k files?
> I have never seen an agent output an implementation called FooImpl that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file, but I have seen plenty of human code like this.
I've seen countless vibecoded implementations that look exactly like that. Especially painful is agents adding the same utility functions in each and every file instead of properly reusing or splitting things.
And then I have to fix them.