alt Hacker NewsThis is a good example of what LLMs save us from.
Everyone likes to pretend that LLMs are only capable of writing mudballs, but it's trivially debunked by using LLMs yourself to refactor code, pay back debt, and fan out agents to look for debt to repay.
We're already at the point with sota models where I'm not even sure you can get the sort of mudballs OP is talking about; the LLM's inherent "taste" forbids it, and it can just end-to-end refactor as requirements change.
The hypermudballs were distinctly a human creation due to how expensive it is to generalize and refactor brittle, incremental production code.
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While I agree and I have done more than one rewrite / cleanup of messy codebases quite successfully with LLMs in the past few months, I can assure you plenty of people are still using the latest models to accrue technical debt faster than I thought was ever possible. The model "taste", assuming it has one, does not survive bad instructions
I'm willing to keep an open mind but the only example you've shared of such a success story and debunk was a LLM clearing the technical debt of a codebase that was fully LLM-written from the very first commit?
If LLMs are so good at fixing tech debts, why did it write so much to begin with? And why do you assume that now there's no more debt?