Writing code at enterprise level is insanely difficult. You are constrained by budget, staff, legacy databases/environments, business rules hiding all over the place, and people.

You can't just rewrite everything. So over many years people are touching small parts of the pie.

If it works it isn't low quality.

I don't doubt that. But humans still need to be responsible for understanding what they're shipping. And IMO you get your best understanding by actually writing some code. Even if you don't actually ship what you wrote.

I'm not so sure that's a fair comparison.

So much "bad" enterprise code evolved into that state over years or even decades of small changes. Meanwhile, last year I got to watch an LLM-authored codebase speedrun itself into a similar state in only a couple months. And I would say that the enterprise code was actually better. It at least did its job fairly reliably. The LLM codebase was riddled with defects, so much so that it ate up all our time and our feature delivery rate ground to a halt.

There are two observations that really eat at me:

1. Studies seem to indicate that agentic coding uses 2-10x as many lines of code to accomplish the same task.

2. One of the only really well-established empirical results in software engineering is the strong association between LOC and defect rate.

Indeed. And not fair comparisons ”look at the quality of this small one-shot Claude hobby project. The quality is less than this major open source project written by some of the best developers in the world”

That is very true and with llms someone who wrote low quality code can now output a whole lot more code. Maybe in better quality, maybe not.

Not "a lot of". "The majority of".

I've been doing development, in one way or another, since the 90s. I've worked with dozens of teams from enterprises to startups. Hundreds of developers. The quality of work has been all over the place, but the majority was not great.

I'm arguing that what people today call "AI slop" is already higher quality than what most developers created historically, and the fact that tests and documentation pretty much come for free now means that the floor has been raised.

The quality of AI generated code is not great. Yes, it will get better. It's already better than 65%+ of what regular devs can do AND it is faster to produce, iterate, and release.

1. People didn’t wear that as a badge of honour though.

2. A lot of it wasn’t. Low quality code/speed serves a purpose for point solutions and scripts etc. That’s not the same thing as writing a core system and if the user doesn’t put any credentials in for an S3 bucket then it falls back to giving information about your own S3 bucket (as I’ve seen just this week).

3. Plenty of companies you can discern the difference between mission critical systems versus “business” systems where if it falls over it’s annoying but not the end of the world.

This was always due to pressures by management and the company environment, not the workers themselves. It's hard to blame the people writing code when they have to deal with nontechnical leadership that wants to have a feature factory or never given appropriate resources to solve problems.

Blaming workers is always an excuse by poor management.