People keep assuring me that LLMs writing code is a revolution, that as long as we maintain sound engineering practices and tight code review they're actually extruding code fit for purpose in a fraction of the time it would take a human.

And every damned time, every damned time any of that code surfaces, like Anthropic's flagship offering just did, somehow it's exactly the pile of steaming technical debt and fifteen year old Stack Overflow snippets we were assured your careful oversight made sure it isn't.

Can someone please explain this to me? Is everyone but you simply prompting it wrong?

It's a good thing programmers aren't susceptible to hubris in any way, or this would have been so much worse.

@bodil I imagine that the fact that no one has to dive into the spaghetti means they don't care about it. Treating it like bytecode or binaries, the optimization and maintenance of which are Somebody Else's Problem™. I've only just started reading about folks profiling the trash heaps these things spit out, and it doesn't look great.
@cargot_robbie @bodil Which is pretty much how JavaScript, Typescript, and Perl have usually been treated.