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.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@noybeu/114262003439129906

Ready for another joke? 🥁

The Irish Data Protection Commission, which is responsible for most major technology companies ( #Meta, #Google, #Apple, #OpenAI, #Microsoft,...) actually imposes fines in just 0.26% of the cases it handles. And even when a fine is imposed, the money is almost never collected. 🤡

#HappyAprilFools

Anthropic's Claude Code's full source code leaked. Claude is seen by many to be the best coding LLM on the market with Anthropic proudly stating that Claude Code itself is mostly written by the LLM.

Now this sounds good as long as nobody can see the code which is quite the trash fire. Detecting "code sentiment" via regular expressions, variable and functions names containing prompt parts trying to influence the bot, a completely intransparent mess of a control flow that makes actual maintenance and debugging functionally impossible and the prompts ... of the prompts. All the begging and pleading to the chatbot not to do this or not to do that or please to do this.

It is fascinating but it is as far away from actual engineering as drunkenly pissing your name in the snow. Dunno what you call the people prompting software at Anthropic but "engineer" is not it.

Now it is fun to look at the currently hyped product striped bare and showing its pathetic quality but that is the future of software if we let those companies continue to undermine every good practice software engineering has tried establishing.

The software we have to use will be bad, insecure, unmaintainable, expensive with nobody having the skills or resources to build something better. As I wrote a few months ago: LLM based software production is equivalent to saying that fast fashion should be the only way to produce clothing. A tragic degeneration of the quality of the artefacts we rely on build for maximum profit on the backs of people in countries from the global majority.

2016: every line of code is immediately tech debt, the most important design paradigm is simplicity, I maintain a curated personal blog about minimalism

2026: haha I just have my stochastic labubu generate tons of code all the time, I don't even look at it. More is more. I regularly have nervous breakdowns about what it all means on all social media platforms