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.

Coding agents are going to give us lots of data about the correctness of Bram’s Law: “The easier a piece of software is to write, the worse it is implemented in practice.”

Now lots more software is much easier to write.

“One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”

-Omar El Akkad, author and journalist