alt Hacker News> 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.
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> And how long does it take a coding agent to output a thousand lines of code versus a human?
Sometimes the human is faster.
I've seen someone duplicate a class file (already filled with duplicate methods) rather than subclassing, and when called out on this it was because properties were private.
This was a team with just me and him in it, it didn't even really benefit from things being private.
That said, the really important lesson I've learned over the years is that terrible code and practices are almost irrelevant: this app won awards and was highly regarded.
Which is why one of the big problems for the field right now is that a) most code bases still need someone more skilled than a mere robot driver, and b) many developers are not better than that.
In the past, a team of five mid devs and one good one would be fine, because that good one would ride herd on the mid ones. But now those mid ones are slamming out robot code that they're incapable of meaningfully reviewing (because it's better than they are already), and they're just overwhelming the good dev's capacity.
The solution, of course, is to fire them all -- they're worthless now -- but this is not going to happen quickly, and it's probably for the best that it doesn't.