Baldur BjarnasonAll the devs saying that Anthropic’s code quality is “normal” are telling on themselves and everybody they’ve worked with
(Also supports what many have been saying about software quality being a crisis that precedes LLMs, but that’s another story)
Martijn Frazer@baldur the software crisis is definitely what enabled vibe coding, I feel.
When making software was an artisan process, it was hard for corporations to scale it and treat programmers like cogs in a machine.
So they've been trying more and more to fit software development into a neat mold, essentially dumbing down the process, to the point where making an app has become "just slap together some libraries and hey presto".
That has 100% laid the foundation for LLM-generated code, I feel.
Cassandrich@dalias @baldur Yeah this is fair imho!
What I was mainly trying to convey was a sense of caring about what is you're building as a developer.
That's the thing that's lacking imho from corporate coding practices. The workers don't have to care about the software, they don't have to understand the whole thing, they just need to solve the ticket and move on.
This mindset fundamentally undermines the quality of any software project. And also perfectly lays the foundation for LLM-generated code.
Pier Hegeman@dalias @Tijn @baldur I think this framing is a sort of victim blaming. It is not the individual developers who must love and care about the craft. It is the organizations who must mandate, validate, and ultimately incentivize quality. When all funding for architecture, design, QA and maintenance are cut and everything is left to the developer it is an organizational failure, not an individual one. I don’t need my plumber to love their craft, I just need them to follow code and pass inspection. I do agree that this was a problem long before LLMs came along.
@pier @Tijn @baldur I think you're saying exactly what I was trying to say. As someone doing a job you don't have an obligation to love and care for the craft. But the organization you're working for has an obligation to make sure you pay all due attention to safety of the things you produce and to design the process accounting for the possibility that you might fail to do so. Not to incentivize you to cut corners or look the other way when you do.
@dalias @Tijn @baldur Yeah I was meaning to reply further up the chain; I find threading in Ice Cube a bit goofy. I agree with everything you said. I’d even take that further though and suggest that major software platforms that impact significant portions of society should be way more heavily regulated, along the lines of utilities or banks. Relying on an organization to enforce quality when all of their incentives push towards “move fast and break things” is going to be a losing play.