Trivially debunked with the prompt "find technical debt to fix".

https://github.com/danneu/danterm/blob/749942ffa1198f520c8b7...

Here's the result of a prompt that specifically looks for correctness and simplifications to make "by construction" before I added "Design bar: ensure correctness by construction rather than by convention" to AGENTS.md:

https://github.com/danneu/danterm/blob/749942ffa1198f520c8b7...

Yes like any tool, LLMs can be used poorly. But they do enable large-scale rewrites or poor-quality code because they are capable of understanding it and enumerating its behaviors in a matter of minutes or hours. It's the kind of understanding that would take a human months or years to develop.

Add to that their ability to basically set up what is essentially a perfect testing environment when asked, and you've got a feedback loop that lets you just step back while the agent cranks out a new implementation in a memory-safe language with a full test suite and bug-for-bug compatibility. I'm not kidding or exaggerating. This stuff is possible now, people just need to look past their anxieties about being replaced.

There is a lot of noise out there from anti-AI types who never seriously tried to clean up messes with AI. If you just ask for new features and never look at the code, coding agents will make a mess. If you often ask questions about how to clean up messy code, coding agents are great help for that, too. But you have to ask.

They can help with it if you point them in the right direction.

I’ll be the second then. I’ve found it’s very good at creating debt but equally good at resolving it. The thing is the default mode is creating debt so you have to intentionally pay it down.

Refactors that used to take me a month now take a week, it’s very handy. You can instruct them to move functions around, change interfaces, add or remove abstractions, remove redundant authorities, untangle spaghetti, rename identifiers across a codebase, and it will return very good results.

[dead]