alt Hacker NewsYeah, it's baffling. I can't relate to these statements at all. What are people doing? Surely the smart people of HN would have been able to figure this out a long time ago.
I also don't find these people in real life. Even the most junior developers I know are able to navigate this without creating this supposed mess.
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I've seen two camps of people within the same company I work at. Some think AI is generating acceptable code. Others think it's generating slop.
I sit in the middle a lot of the time as my opinion on code quality vary depending on how important the code actually is.
I will say one thing, the people who I generally deemed as worse developers prior to the wide AI roll out are the ones that are more accepting of AI code. And consequently, they're the ones spending a magnitude more money each day. The people who were writing better code and, in my opinion, were stronger developers, are spending less on AI and are generating more acceptable code when they use it. And they can spot issues from a mile away, because they actually understand the code being generated. They're not just committing lots of redundant code.
We had an AI outage for a day or two a few weeks back. The reaction from some people was like it was the end of the world and they couldn't do any work. Some projects got put on hold because no one actually knew how to work on the code base without AI. Other, better in my opinion, developers just went shrugged it off and got on with their job.
AI over-dependence is a big issue that people will face more and more. Weaker juniors used to just be a bit slower and stagnate a bit, but they could still kinda work independently and understand what they were doing. Now they are almost entirely prompt monkeys, take away their Claude Code terminal and they are completely stumped.
It’s not a mess as in spaghetti code, which you will find with novice programmers. It’s a mess as in complex and disjointed codebase. Happy path works somewhat, but it crumbles if you run it long enough or encounters an edge case.
You need a very good level of insight to build a codebase to do what is supposed to do, to not do what it shouldn’t do, and to still be comprehensible. Because a software is a system and building system well is what engineering is about.
Its a bit unkind to talk like this - the obvious and equally unproductive response is to question if you are really as good as you think you are. Are those junior developers not making a mess, or do you lack the insight to see it?