alt Hacker NewsIt's an interesting philosophic question. LLMs tend to be overly verbose and defensive in coding. It's not a ton of extra complexity but it makes the code harder to follow for a human. But if a human is not writing the code how much does that matter?
I agree that they have gotten shockingly good. It's been a long time since I've seen them do something that is objectively wrong. Once we get closer to the "too cheap to meter" cost level things will change radically again.
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> It's not a ton of extra complexity but it makes the code harder to follow for a human.
It is. I have seen Claude chasing after endless amount of edge cases that are just irrelevant in real usage especially for the kind of users we are supporting. At some point you need to stop reasoning about all those cases because it has zero benefit.
But it IS a ton of complexity and blows out context windows. Less code good. More code bad. Both for human and agent. Somehow, still only human can make code less.
Have you ever tried to use an LLM to add a feature to a really nice, pre 2023 codebase? It’s incredible how much easier it is to do, how much of a difference you instantly feel