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CharlieDigitaltoday at 1:08 PM1 replyview on HN

AI is not better nor worse at producing code rot; just faster at it.

AI produced code is a function of the team driving and instructing the agents along with the scaffolding produced by the team (skills, examples, docs, comments); same with human teams.

A team that cannot guide a human team to produce better code will not be able to guide an AI team to produce better code because it's the same skillset: being able to write good docs, create constraints structurally in code, produce core architecture that enforces good behavior.


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ACCount39today at 1:18 PM

Not entirely wrong, but there's a very big hole: "the scaffolding produced by the team" also includes the scaffolding produced by past AIs.

An AI that knows how to keep the documentation accurate and up to date, and does it by default, would, all other things equal, rot your codebase less. An AI that changes the code without checking whether it obsoleted a bunch of examples in the docs would rot your codebase more.

While I think that you can reduce "AI-induced code rot" with good prompting and steering, you could also make headway against it at model level, by making the AI "well-behaved" by default.

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