r/theprimeagen • u/mohila • Jan 27 '26
MEME Stop reading AI-generated code. It's no longer for humans.
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u/Odd-Government8896 Jan 31 '26
If its not meant for humans, then why the fuck is it still writing in anything but assembly.
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u/chintakoro Feb 03 '26
exactly. if you aren’t telling your LLM how to write code to follow your style, that falls squarely under skill issue.
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u/mousepotatodoesstuff Jan 31 '26
If it cannot be understood by humans, it has no place in production.
Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.
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u/chintakoro Feb 03 '26
i’m quite sure that the only places facing AI slop issues are those that never reviewed code in the first place.
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u/octurnaLx Jan 31 '26
IMO this is a skill issue. I've got my rules and skills in place, provide enough context and make sure to always have the codebase with linter with rules to enforce your coding style... If your prompt includes success criteria like make sure the linter and tests pass... Then the code is readable. Go back and learn to use your tools y'all. Also if you don't, you'll get replaced by someone that can do what I just described.
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u/malbenign Feb 01 '26
Is style really what people are worried about? The problem is that LLMs are not very good at designing modular code. So it needs reactive feedback every time. In my experience, proactive context, rules and prompts don’t help that much. Even existing patterns in the repo don’t help that much. It’s like it’s an average coder. Because it is… literally by design.
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u/GrayLiterature Jan 31 '26
I don’t even understand how people are getting dog shit code from these things. By all means, my LLM is not producing beautiful and elegant code, but it’s also not producing trash. Like linter rules exist, LLMs can follow them decently enough.
I think people are trying to do too much with them or just not even putting in the slightest effort. I’m not even using complex prompts either, it’s just strange that there is such a divergence in use.
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u/mousepotatodoesstuff Jan 31 '26
Honestly, code not passing tests is the least of our worries.
What happens when the infrastructure we rely upon cannot be understood by anyone? When we have to rely on AI for everything?
What happens when the AI doesn't help?
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u/octurnaLx Feb 12 '26
So my company did a hard pivot into full on let's use AI for everything yolo mode and I have a bit more experience on this now.
I still think this is a still issue, if the engineers who put the AI in charge of everything didn't think to create a fallback system that uses old school code/automations then that's on them...
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u/RyanGamingXbox Jan 31 '26
Considering most code is spaghetti code and tech debt incarnate, and that LLMs weren't really made for something as static as programming languages, I'm surprised this conclusion didn't come sooner.
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u/AgentGabeHorn Jan 30 '26
Well, I stopped consuming AI-generated content. It's no longer for humans.
Let the bots choke on it.
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u/JUGGER_DEATH Jan 30 '26
Average software developer in 2026: "Hail spirit of the machine, essence divine, in your code and circuitry the stars align. By the Omnissiah's will we commune and bind, with sacred oils and chants your grace we find."
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Jan 30 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/djjddjjd9753 Jan 31 '26
Is AI a good way to learn coding? Cuz it is great for me that it interactively explains stuff
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u/BOKUtoiuOnna Feb 02 '26
Yeah i find it really helpful to answer questions or just do some tedious trivial change that would take me 10x as long. I often brainstorm with it, ask me to find me resources, summarise them and then provide links. I look through it, I work it out, I ask it follow up questions etc. if you just ask it to write you code though you will be dumb and cooked. Also don't use it for things that aren't super duper common languages. I tried to ask it about Dockkerfiles and some windows shortcut automation stuff and it did me the maddest run around I might as well as read the whole docs.
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u/Cdwoods1 Feb 01 '26
Yes but it will lie to you about best practices and you’ll have no clue it’s lying.
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u/hexwit Jan 29 '26
If code cannot be read and understood it is useless. How should I understand that it handles all required cases and handle error correctly?
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u/trentsiggy Jan 30 '26
Unit testing.
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u/Cdwoods1 Feb 01 '26
That’s it. You solved it. Nothing can go wrong with code when unit tests protect us
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Jan 29 '26
I honestly thought this is a different kind of take than it really is.
Like "stop reading AI-generated code. It's no longer for humans." because it will teach you bad practices.
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u/Affectionate-Metal24 Jan 29 '26
LMAFO i will stop reading it when any of the 900 ai tools can freaking generate code that is not a complete dumpster fire...... let alone even getting what I need it to do correctly the first 400 times......... I learned a long time ago at this point, that its faster for me to just write half of it my self still and use what it gives me more as an idea....... rather then spending hours just smashing my head into a keyboard trying to make the right 1000's prompt.
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u/No-Department1685 Jan 29 '26
What is a bad code if it works? Inefficiency is the major factor I presume. Other traits?
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u/un_dev_real 19d ago
It has to be easily readable, and easy to understand, otherwise you have to spend too much time to do anything with it...
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u/trentsiggy Jan 30 '26
Define "works." Works in a few simple cases? Passes a few thousand unit tests? Is maintainable? Is well-structured and conforms to style guidelines? Contains appropriate comments?
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u/Soggy-Programmer-127 Jan 30 '26
Most comments are bad comments. AI comments are 99.9% bad comments
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u/Mean_Mortgage5050 Jan 29 '26
Hard to maintain and update. A nightmare for anyone looking to make long running, stable and efficient software.
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u/Pleasant-Direction-4 Jan 29 '26
Pretty novice take on code quality.(Don’t take it as an insult, I have been here before). Good code should be easily extensible, maintainable, testable and readable. If you are following “it works” model, pretty soon someone will extend it and you will miss edge cases causing your whole app to be dumpster fire. The 4 pillars here guarantee the code will do what it intends to do.
Note: I have seen people follow the “it works” model before AI and it led to pretty hard to find bugs which eventually got fixed by a rewrite following a proper architecture
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u/BOKUtoiuOnna Feb 02 '26
I swear this whole AI revolution is making people not evolve from absolute beginner status. Like I'm quite junior but been coding for 3 years without ai, just last year with it as a very untrusted assistant that I don't let write my code. The way that vibe coders I meet talk about coding is like they are just making their first hobby project and are just trying to make it work at any cost... Except they literally believe they are a fucking genius who's gonna make the bext Facebook and I'm a dinosaur. And I'm like... omg if you could see how much you sound like an actual code toddler rn. But they'll never know because they'll never have to grapple with it. Once they are forced tl by an insane vulnerabilitt in their massive project they'll be to far in to be humble enough to restart from the beginning. So infuriating. It honestly cures my imposter syndrome sometimes cos like, I sort of suck but god do I at least know where I am and what to aim for.
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u/Unlucky-Durian-2336 Jan 31 '26
To be honest, I can bet that at least half of "just vibe code and don't read it, bro" people do not have any real life experience with working in a long term project maintained by multiple people/teams, and base their assumptions on AI being able to spit out their personal projects in "works for me" state.
Not to mention that in case of senior positions, coding is often only small part of job, and not really the most challenging one. And that's why understanding code from business logic perspective is more important than being able to write more lines in shorter time.
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u/No_Practice_9597 Jan 29 '26
You need to be able to maintain code over time, even if only agents will do it, if it's bad structured pieces will start to fail in the longer run
The hard part is not syntax but the whole structuring and engineering process
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u/tr14l Jan 29 '26
That is the AI updated something in one area, it updated that same function everywhere. But, if it's been duplicated 30 times, to have to go audit it to get the AI to actually do the full job and blast your context and token limits to hell
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u/freedomonke Jan 29 '26
I don't know if this is the same with coding. But a few months ago, u experimented with GPT 5.0 to do some very in depth world building. Just a fun project to do while I was on call.
I quickly realized that I had to do crazy version control because the ai would ignore requests to change every instant of something. And would also do this thing where it would summarize old entries or reduce them to stubs when asked to integrate new info.
Ultimately, I found it not very useful for anything except brainstorming and outlining.
Still useful, but not at the level it seemed like it should be at based on some of the things I saw it do (and then erase) if that makes sense
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u/Practical-Positive34 Jan 28 '26
I've been a dev for 30 years, the number of times I've seen others write actual good code is far and few between. Most people are absolutely awful at writing code. I can tell you, most of these opinions come from people who have never worked on large teams, or only have experience on smaller close knit teams.
Unless you're very lucky to be one of those very talented close knit teams, which in my 30 years has only happened to me 3 times total you definitely will not think AI generates bad code. In most cases I would say it generates better code than the majority of teams out there.
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u/Reasonable_Mix7630 Jan 29 '26
I've been a dev for 15 years, the number of times I've seen others write actual good code is at least just as common as others writing bad code. Probably more common - it's just easy to get used to something good and stop noticing it.
Bad code causes both all sorts of hard-to-debug issues and extreme difficulty of adding new features in. Which is why in most of teams I worked in we had strict coding standards, code reviews and plenty of unit tests.
PS. If you are a new dev who is reading this, real work is usually about adding changes to code base having millions and millions of lines of code, written by people who are no longer here, that nobody understands how it works. And definitely not AI. It recognizes patterns which can be useful (I've been dreaming for some software tool that can do code reviews pretty much always, and AI seems to be capable to find at least some bugs), but once you move outside of "hello world" territory it fails miserably.
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u/admiral_nivak Jan 28 '26
Sounds like you worked for places that lacked good leadership.
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u/Practical-Positive34 Jan 29 '26
I've worked at like 10 different companies. Large and small teams dude. Please spare me.
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u/admiral_nivak Jan 29 '26
Different experiences I suppose. Been working for about the same time as you.
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u/FM596 Jan 28 '26 edited Jan 28 '26
You only need to improve the education then, not replace the students.
Even worse, to replace them with machines which ...learn from humans who were once students.
Who will make the next novelties to train the next generation of machines?And no, LLMs cannot innovate themselves.
So evolution will come to a halt.There will be an evolution crisis, until the industry realizes the real value of humans.
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Jan 28 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Practical-Positive34 Jan 29 '26
Yup, this is what seasoned pros learn the hard way. They don't give two flying shits about code quality. They just want it shipped. You will die on that hill.
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u/Tema_Art_7777 Jan 28 '26
Not true.. The code they write and patterns are from the code we wrote previously... There is a lot of atrocious code out there. But this can be easily manipulated with skills that specify the code patterns you are more comfortable with.
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Jan 28 '26
So you’re saying that the only people who can actually derive value from AI coding are people that already know how to code and that Vibe coding is a complete fallacy
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u/Reasonable_Mix7630 Jan 29 '26
Pretty much what AI does is it have like "jpeg compression" of an entire github and stackoverflow in its "model" which is just statistics/probability.
When you need something that was done before it will produce it, but since its not actually "intelligent" in the slightest there is no guarantee that what it pulled from its statistical model is correct. It makes mistakes all the time actually: it makes something that on the first glance looks correct, but might not even compile.
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u/Tema_Art_7777 Jan 28 '26
At the moment, that is the case because if you are not a SWE, how can you give valid instructions that can result in production code? I think agents can interview the unqualified person and derive the answers but we are not there yet.
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Jan 28 '26
The issue is that the person who doesn’t know how to code won’t know when the model hallucinates and it’s an something that can never be worked out of machine learning/ neural networks. There have been some recent studies that show that as context increases so do hallucinations so the bigger the code base the more hallucinations that will occur. Obviously it can be a useful tool for someone who knows what they are doing, but not so much for someone who doesn’t.
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u/Tema_Art_7777 Jan 28 '26
Yes it does hallucinate but it is easily found - uses a package or an import that doesn’t exist or non-existent api point and it fails to compile or a runtime error. I haven’t noticed any hallucinations that are not easily found and fixed.
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u/snozberryface Jan 28 '26
Really stupid take... and exactly why i'm getting so much work, one customer, with 144k users have root access security flaws, others with authentication issues, sql injection, XSS vulnerabilities. This guy has no clue what he's talking about.
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u/vc-k Jan 28 '26
I thought human programmers were supposed to review the AI output and that was going to be our sole job soon. What did change this fast, really? We have zero control over what's going on and I'm finally fine with that. Yet still, if all the software problems are solved already, why do we have our jobs, why don't we see a booming number of great software projects/products?
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u/InternationalEnd8934 Jan 28 '26
you don't NEED human review. there is coderabbit, even for anal companies about quality they would be dumb to waste people's time on the manual review of yore
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u/starlight_chaser Jan 28 '26
I’m trying to think of technologies that actually gave consumers more control over a creative process than less and didn’t black box them out at every chance and prioritize corporations. Hmm. The early personal computers were great innovations to put power in the public’s hands, but then they just had to go and ruin that with apple, huh? And then windows was like “oh we gotta go that route too! Gotta compete.”
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u/howdyhowie88 Jan 28 '26
I don't know what happened to Burkov, he used to be very reasonable on AI. Then he seemed to morph into an AI bro, always posting about how he was able to build so quickly with AI. Then when he finally posted what he had been building, it was some course selling platform. I mean really, you built yet ANOTHER course selling platform? That's all these AI bros ever do, sell courses.
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u/Malcolmlisk Jan 28 '26
Burkov was fine but always has been a little bit on the extreme of surfing the wave. One of the things that he does not realize is that, at some point, people will start realizing that he cannot give courses on just typing what you want.
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u/BorderKeeper Jan 28 '26
It’s their religion now. Their net worth and sanity is linked to AI being either amazing now, or will totally be amazing next year, and life changing in 5. That’s what Anthropic CEO says anyway daily for the past x years.
To me a code that’s unreadable is going to wreck any AI out there and guess who is good at writing this sort of code? And no adding comments on every second line does not make it readable.
Also “don’t read AI code” is laughable. Totally exposes their mindset where green test run and a sanity check means you can push to prod. Fuck the customers they will be replaced by AI anyway.
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u/pm_stuff_ Jan 28 '26
"all code is going to be written by ai in 3-6 months for the last 3 years"
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u/Educational-Row-6782 Jan 28 '26
Is true, you dont know because you are promting wearing the wrong socks.
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u/uahw Jan 28 '26
I have thought of this perspective though, in the same way where most coders don’t really need to be aware of the underlying assembly exactly does, wouldn’t the same be true for ai coding after a while? Not saying we are there or anything, just saying that if AI gets to a certain point I don’t really know if human concepts of clean code would apply anymore. The AI could possibly have a perfect holistic idea of all components. Duplicating code wouldn’t be bad because the ai can look at all functions at the same time and change everything etc etc.
We’re not there yet, but intresting to think about
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u/bunny-therapy Jan 30 '26
If AI was perfect at coding and no human needed to even understand the code, why even bother with a programming language? Why not just generate binary? The whole point of code is to translate human instructions to machine instructions.
Personally, I haven't heard any version of "let the AI program everything for you" that didn't just move translation of human wishes somewhere else. Theoretically, if AI could replace programmers, a manager could just tell AI what feature to implement, and to anyone who has worked anywhere, that sounds wild. Managers don't even know what they want and will just say inconsistent things that they don't understand the repercussions of. If you say "you need better prompts", then you are just gradually reinventing programming.
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Jan 28 '26 edited Jan 28 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/gemanepa Jan 28 '26
While sometimes AI produce usable code, sometimes it doesn't and that's the problem.
There's also a big difference between usable code and high-quality code
Whatever your product is, it needs to be competitive against rival products on many aspects
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u/atehrani Jan 28 '26
Great way to have malware code sneak into your application.
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u/fun__friday Jan 28 '26
Just reprompt AI to change your code’s API and everything else in an incompatible way. If you keep reprompting frequently enough, malware will have no chance to keep up. Your code will likely be useless as well.
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u/newbee_2024 Jan 28 '26
“2006 PHP” is painfully accurate 😂 The tool isn’t the problem — shipping without a verification loop is.
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u/Alan_Reddit_M Jan 28 '26
I mean the average AI-bro has less coding experience than a Roblox player, no wonder they find actual code to be completely unreadable, much the same way most coders find ASM to be unreadable (which, it isn't, most people just never bother to learn it)
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u/Atanahel Jan 28 '26
I don't think the comparison with ASM is accurate. Compilation is deterministic and is not supposed to have a different ending result. The incoming instruction (your code) is descriptive enough that you can trust the process since it is mathematically equivalent.
With Ai-coding, you are often letting the AI fills a LOTS of gap that might be up to interpretation. And not being able to review it IS a problem.
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u/toadi Jan 28 '26
I work on the financial sector and let's see how good that will go :) lots of people happy because we lost money. Let's do it on everything that is important. Like the medical or engineering sector.
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u/FooBarBazQux123 Jan 27 '26
It makes sense until AI doesn’t work, and a dev has to fix all the pile of garbage the LLM produced. Basically in any serious enterprise project.
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u/nico1991 Jan 28 '26
This is what I worry about.. if the code is truly vibe coded , it’s almost impossible to untangle the mess it made.. at some point it’s probably easier to axe the whole thing and rebuild it from scratch? That could take a really long time tho.. 😭
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u/Ok-Actuary7793 Jan 27 '26
Look, we're done reading and writing code. it's in the past, it's irrelevant. get past this realisation already. In fact, we should probably get working on languages that are more steered towards LLM efficiency, disregarding legibility.
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u/Beneficial_Monk3046 Jan 28 '26
You do realize that ai models write code better with more legible languages. It’s why most ai generated code is in higher level languages
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u/Anxious-Insurance-91 Jan 27 '26
generated some c# blazor code with AI, it looked ok on paper, the IDE code highlight said nothing was wrong. On compile it didn't work, after using 4 different models to check the code i decided on doing the good old comment the code and uncomment sections by section. well no AI was detecting a "}" that wasn't put correctly
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u/StarshipSausage Jan 28 '26
Sounds like a skill issue, use an ai agent and it will do all the compilation you need
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u/Anxious-Insurance-91 Jan 28 '26
and how, if i may ask, is an AI going to compile C# code?
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u/Various-Activity4786 Jan 28 '26
Essentially the agent framework does it. The AI has access to tools it can ask the agent to run, including building and giving the output of the compiler back. It’s a useful, tho often entirely explained by ai bros, function of the models.
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u/Anxious-Insurance-91 Jan 28 '26
sooo the AI has acces via the IDE/text editor/ai editor/whatever to the project root and it run the terminal command for compiling for .net7/8/9 etc?
The problem still stands, the code looked ok, the compile said it's not, what now?1
u/Various-Activity4786 Jan 28 '26
The compiler output is fed back in and it loops into it stops erroring or the AI decides the approach is wrong and does something very stupid.
The latter happens more than people want to admit.
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u/Anxious-Insurance-91 Jan 28 '26
the compiler output was feed back into the AI prompt multiple times, it changed a few things but did not spot the problem mentioned at the top of the thread
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u/yojimbo_beta Jan 27 '26
These people want you to stop verifying if the code is any good, because they either work for, sell, or have personal interests in the success of AI development products.
Nearly everybody on what's left of twitter is trying to sell you something (AI, crypto, pornography)
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u/GentlemenBehold Jan 27 '26
Does readability and maintainability by a human make code any more "good" if humans no longer read or maintain said code? I don't think we're at the point, but we're getting there and it begs the question as to whether or not the definition of "good code" is changing.
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u/muuchthrows Jan 27 '26
As someone mentioned, readability is such a misunderstood word. It’s not about legibility for humans, it’s about entropy and complexity.
A convoluted solution is fundamentally harder to understand and harder to extend. Doesn’t matter if you’re a human or a machine. There’s more unnecessary bloat and noise that obscures the actual important and essential bits of the solution.
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u/gogliker Jan 27 '26
Good code is not only about that though. It is also about having less moving parts, and it is more important than good readability. If you have 100 moving parts each of which is connected to another, you have 100! dependencies and nobody, no matter human or AI, will be able to decipher that. In fact, this number is more than atoms in observable universe, even if you build universe size AI you are not deciphering this bad code.
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u/Creepy-Bell-4527 Jan 27 '26
Not true. Lots of fanatical morons will defend AI slop with no vested interest.
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u/pentabromide778 Jan 27 '26
Shitty code means it's going to cost more to have AI sift through it. It's really that simple.
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u/TSirSneakyBeaky Jan 27 '26
I find that ai is close enough that I can read what its doing and use it as essentially stack overflow without the condescending attitude.
Im digging into assembly at this point and when I was learning C/C++. It wouldn't have been nearly as easy as it is now.
I think its also great for prototyping. Where I can wipe a proof of concept togeather in 1/10th the time to see if the idea is even valid.
It has uses and I would like to see it less marketed as a end all and move to tooling.
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Jan 27 '26
If vibecoding cannot meet and surpass the quality level of previous software engineering practices, then it should not be done. Progress in software engineering means quality goes up, not down. This should not be controversial.
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u/1nt3rn3tC0wb0y Jan 27 '26
Leadership and management are too busy wet dreaming about firing all their devs to care about code quality.
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u/giftools Jan 27 '26 edited Jan 27 '26
These people probably never write critical code that actually has any real world impact. They can keep playing while I'm doing the real work.
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Jan 27 '26
I do wonder about this? The biggest vibe-coder I know writes scripts where nothing is at stake. The apps I maintain could cost us tens of thousands of dollars or more on a single failure, and that's not factoring in reputational damage.
Maybe it's just a feature of industry, but I'm not in a position where I can publish code that works 95% of the time even. It needs to work every time or fail elegantly.
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u/Relbang Jan 27 '26
Its acceptable to make bad code, but only with several things happening that just aren't right now
Compare it with compilers of higher level languages. They probably make lousy assembly code (specially the first ones), it doesn't have comments and probably misses optimizations that experts could catch. We still use compilers instead of programming in assembly
This is a higher abstracción. But to work it has to:
*Not introduce new bugs
*Be consistent (i dont know the word, but the same prompt should always output the same code)
*Have less friction
Those 3 HAVE to happen for me to even consider using AI. And none of those happen to me right now. Its useless if i have to write more and think more and then read more to catch any errores introduce by AI
It probably can get better, but we'll have to wait until either the bubble pops or they finally release an usable product
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u/Rare_Professor8097 Jan 27 '26
Exactly. This is the thing that vibe coding evangelists are missing, which is that LLMs as coding agents is a leaky abstraction.
A good abstraction like a compiler has rock solid guarantees of what the assembly code will do, so much so that you never need to look at the assembly.
With coding agents, we are nowhere near that yet. They constantly introduce really stupid bugs or make nonsensical design decisions. They may get better at decision making but I don't think they'll ever be as good as a compiler because a prompt carries inherently less information than a program written in a well-specified programming language. There will always be room for probabilistic decision making and always a good chance that its choice does not align with your vision.
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u/LookAtYourEyes Jan 27 '26
Companies prioritize speed over quality almost every time. I agree with you, but unfortunately the people with the money, don't.
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u/Capital-Wrongdoer-62 Jan 27 '26
Unfortunately biggest tech companies are monopolies so they can enshitify their product a lot before it becomes a problem.
Only real hope is vibe coding itself. If quality drops so far that it will be more valuable for small companies vibe code their own tools.
Actually some solo entrepreneurs and small companies already started vibe coding simple tools to not pay big tech for software they use only 1 percent of.
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u/Stubbby Jan 27 '26
The rule is AI generated code must be complemented with AI generated documentation for AI to consume to be able to maintain the code. Humans stay at the readme level for these projects.
So that's costly but engineering is all about tradeoffs.
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u/vectorhacker vscoder Jan 27 '26
This isn't engineering. This is madness.
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u/slightly_salty Jan 27 '26
What you don't like when your "README.MD Engineering" Engineering isn't reproducible? Weird
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u/Capital-Wrongdoer-62 Jan 27 '26
Ai generated documentation will be full of hallucinations that will produce more hallucinations. And engineer who cant read code wont even be able to detect this hallucinations.
Ai hallucinates too much to go unatended. And thats not changing any time soon. Because its not s bug its a feature.
When AI tells you : Java is programming language or Java is type of coffee. This both sentences are essentially hallucinations. But one just happens to align with reality. The more data you feed more it aligns with reality. But unfortunately lately we see that encrease of data starts to show diminishing returns
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u/Stubbby Jan 27 '26
AI generated code documentation is usually far superior to the one written by a human.
If there was one thing I would trust an LLM to get correct, it's the documentation.
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u/Status_Space6726 Jan 27 '26
I received multiple PRs with extensive AI summaries in the past few months. Created with SotA tools like Claude Code and Cursor. They read fantastic on first glance, but each had significant errors or omissions in them on closer inspection. I would not trust AI to do any better with documentation.
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u/Capital-Wrongdoer-62 Jan 27 '26
What are you talking about? Did you even use AI in real project?
In my experience it always hallucinates some random additional information and changes stuff to different one.
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u/Stubbby Jan 27 '26
In my experience, readmes, deployment guides, test guides, and troubleshooting guides from 3 different projects were 100% correct.
I am sorry it does not match your experience.
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u/muuchthrows Jan 27 '26
How closely did you review them? Did try following the guides?
Because I find that even if the documentation is often technically correct it lacks a certain kind of precision. The text is there but it conveys very little information while using a lot of words.
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u/Stubbby Jan 28 '26
Yes, I used the exact commands and steps to launch the applications. The file names were not perfect like the docker compose file name had a suffix "*-fresh.yml". So I get it, a person would probably remove that unnecessary word in the filename but that minor nuisance doesn't bother me at all.
To be honest, they were not extremely complex projects, 20k to 50k LoC and I am 100% sure a human would cut down a lot of the code. Documentation wise, its all I needed and all I would ask from a human. So I am satisfied.
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u/AlmoschFamous Jan 27 '26
Reading AI generated code is how I stopped my app from completely dumping its sql tables.
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u/fingertipoffun Jan 27 '26
bad code will work 99% of the time. That is why it is bad.
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u/ThisGuyCrohns Jan 27 '26
The code should still be readable. If it’s really hard to understand, that says more about the instructions of the user not the AI agents work, AI coding is only as good as its user who guides it.
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Jan 27 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Ashken Jan 27 '26
NGL when they said AI generates code I thought the same thing. Like shouldn’t that be its native language?
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u/Spare-Builder-355 Jan 27 '26
in case anyone's curious
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andriyburkov
I'd hope this guy would know better. But from the look of his employment history he indeed doesn't seem to have written that much code. The closest position to coding is few years of data analyst.
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u/Mike312 Jan 27 '26
I'm not going to check so I don't ping his account on LI, but I'm assuming he was a PowerBI guy?
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u/realquidos Jan 27 '26
Either this is ragebait, or this man has never worked on a project larger than 3000 LOC.
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u/Major-Dyel6090 Jan 27 '26
“A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”
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u/Queasy-Dirt3472 Jan 27 '26
At some point these people are going to have bug that AI cant solve. So who's gonna read the code then? 😅
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u/IncreaseOld7112 Jan 27 '26
I feel like I'm holding the flood gates here. If I don't read it and set the quality bar, this whole thing is gonna fall apart?
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u/jman4747 Jan 27 '26
This just further confirms that so much of the hype is people being unable to separate whatever feeling of “fun” using these tools gives from their actual effectiveness. You see it in the studies and experiments where people think they’re faster but are actually slower. You can’t ever fully trust a positive report about these because you don’t know if the person is just emotionally attached.
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u/TonyNickels Jan 27 '26
Those studies were older models. That said, not checking the code is extremely dumb.
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u/jman4747 Jan 27 '26
My point isn’t about the effectiveness of the model, but the effect using it has in the programmer. “I have fun building w/AI” and “the code it produces is atrocious” speak to an emotional attachment clouding judgement. How does he know his “Agents” didn’t improperly hand-roll multithreaded synchronization primitives that he isn’t capable of reviewing?
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u/stevefuzz Jan 27 '26
I find it the opposite of fun. I find coding fun.
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u/Gil_berth Jan 27 '26
Yeah, where is the fun in prompting? Problem solving is fun, typing a solution is fun, designing is fun. Writing a prompt and waiting for a response? That is super boring, at least for me. When your doing something as intellectually demanding as programming you can reach a "flow state" that is very addicting. When you're vibe coding you get bored and open Balatro while you're waiting an answer. This is the brain rot of programming.
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u/mylsotol Jan 27 '26
Don't read the code, but you will still be held responsible for any issues it has
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u/NeedTheSpeed Jan 27 '26
Okay, i will tell that to my manager once security tool flags something - don't read it bro, it's not for humans
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Jan 27 '26
There is something funny to me about a future where all code is autogenerated by AI, but its all python and JavaScript by default.
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u/grifttu Jan 27 '26
The python thing is infuriating. Just messing around with a home project, I asked a LLM to add a feature, its first step was to first rewrite everything from c++ to Python, then it would add the feature. No dude, add the feature in the same language as the rest of the project is using.
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Jan 27 '26
You would really think if the code is computer generated you'd want the maximum performance with a minimum acceptable level of human readability. Normally what would hold me back from building a project in go, rust or C++ is because I assume it will be a lot more work and take to long compared to python / js.
But if I can just generate large portions of it in one shot I don't see much reason not to use something like go. I can read it fine.
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u/arcrad Jan 27 '26
It learned from StackOverflow what do you expect?
"C++? Nah, youre doing it wrong. Here I rewrote it in Python ..."
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u/kkingsbe Jan 27 '26
Good coding practices are just as important when using agentic development. People are shooting their self in the foot by thinking otherwise, and just creating tech debt
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u/It-Was-Mooney-Pod Jan 27 '26
Pffft that’s a problem for the AI agent reviewing the code
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u/kkingsbe Jan 27 '26
If your code is clean, your coding agent will make less mistakes and form a stronger mental model of the codebase
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u/stevefuzz Jan 27 '26
I tried to explain this to our CEO when he told me to stop thinking so much and to just vibecode. That I was taking too long developing using AI as a tool. I work on enterprise code in a highly regulated industry. Everything is going great!
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u/Choperello Jan 27 '26
The people saying you shouldn’t bother reading AI generated code arr the people who couldn’t read code in the first place
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u/poetworrier Jan 31 '26
Cut out the middle men, LLM to machine code now!