alt Hacker News> If mediocre code is better quality than what you wrote by hand
Most code I have seen and reviewed over my 25+ year programmer life has been no worse than mediocre LLM code.
It's not a massive sample, but to me it suggests, most code programmers write, is somewhere between bad and mediocre.
And here's the appeal of the models: if what you used to produced was bad-to-mediocre, and you can now do slightly better for much cheaper, that's a huge win.
> And here's the appeal of the models: if what you used to produced was bad-to-mediocre, and you can now do slightly better for much cheaper, that's a huge win.
And the guy you were responding to is seeing people produce worse code with LLMs (e.g. senior engineers pushing non-library bubble sort implementations, like they're in a high school programming class).
And if you're somehow right, it's not a "huge win" for you. It's a sign you're personally providing little value to the business, and sooner or later you'll need to find a new career.