Measuring the sloppiness of code • Hacker News Board

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#41

Post by perchard » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

danbruc wrote: post #19

Coding is not solved, correctness is not a feature, it is the bare minimum. If your code does not do what it is supposed to do, you could as well have no code at all. Efficiency, security, maintainability, reliability, readability, understandability, extensibility, maintainability, observability, portability, ... this is what high quality coding is about, not that it works, that is a given. And in my experience curre…

second sentence of the article: "Just because the code is formally correct doesn’t mean that it is not introducing unnecessary abstractions, creating duplicates, or just making bad decisions overall. This is not a groundbreaking observation, most people who have vibe-coded a project, have realized that each additional feature can sometimes lead to an explosion of lines of code (LOC)."

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#42

Post by ramijames » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

scronkfinkle wrote: post #12

There is some sense of rose-tinted glasses of pre-LLM coding. A lot of human written code, particularly at the enterprise level, was of low quality well before AI automated it.

Not "a lot of". "The majority of".

I've been doing development, in one way or another, since the 90s. I've worked with dozens of teams from enterprises to startups. Hundreds of developers. The quality of work has been all over the place, but the majority was not great.

I'm arguing that what people today call "AI slop" is already higher quality than what most developers created historically, and the fact that tests and documentation pretty much come for free now means that the floor has been raised.

The quality of AI generated code is not great. Yes, it will get better. It's already better than 65%+ of what regular devs can do AND it is faster to produce, iterate, and release.

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#43

Post by avgDev » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

scronkfinkle wrote: post #12

There is some sense of rose-tinted glasses of pre-LLM coding. A lot of human written code, particularly at the enterprise level, was of low quality well before AI automated it.

Writing code at enterprise level is insanely difficult. You are constrained by budget, staff, legacy databases/environments, business rules hiding all over the place, and people.

You can't just rewrite everything. So over many years people are touching small parts of the pie.

If it works it isn't low quality.

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#44

Post by antoni4040 » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

Coding has been solved for 20 years at least.

90% of problems are easy once you know what you actually want well enough for you to be able to ask it from an LLM.

90% of code before LLMs was badly copied from StackOverflow anyway.

That 10% that's remaining, I've see 0, ZERO, nil progress. Windows is still awful. Spotify still doesn't work correctly offline. Youtube search is trash. Jira takes 20 seconds sometimes to load a task. LLMs haven't created a new database or a new game engine or a new renderer or anything like that.

The maths breakthroughs are really more of a testament to the efforts of the last 150 years for maths to be an organised verifiable principle. If LLMs had to practice math they way Euler did, they wouldn't be able to find shit.

(sorry if I sound incoherent, just some thoughts while I'm commuting)

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#45

Post by j45 » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

It will be fun to try and deterministically define sloppiness relative to a tool that is not deterministic.

Of course, sloppiness to date can be measured by different shared and interpreted preferences and definitions.

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#46

Post by Dlemlo » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

zsoltkacsandi wrote: post #26

danbruc wrote: post #19

Coding is not solved, correctness is not a feature, it is the bare minimum. If your code does not do what it is supposed to do, you could as well have no code at all. Efficiency, security, maintainability, reliability, readability, understandability, extensibility, maintainability, observability, portability, ... this is what high quality coding is about, not that it works, that is a given. And in my experience curre…

That is very well put and summarizes what distinguishes real software development from vibe coding.

I have seen so much production code with garbage code and massive bugs, the industry doesn't care for 'real'.

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#47

Post by dwroberts » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 2:36 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #29

danbruc wrote: post #19

Coding is not solved, correctness is not a feature, it is the bare minimum. If your code does not do what it is supposed to do, you could as well have no code at all. Efficiency, security, maintainability, reliability, readability, understandability, extensibility, maintainability, observability, portability, ... this is what high quality coding is about, not that it works, that is a given. And in my experience curre…

And all of these things will be solved one by one. It's astounding to me that people can see coding get solved and not think every single one of these tasks won't be solved too. Why do you not think these things aren't going to be completely automated? What makes these tasks special? Fable and Astra can one-shot video games with compelling novel game loops. They can do systems programming, distributed systems, roboti…

I think the usage of solved is silly. Things get automated, they basically never get ‘solved’.

Will all these things get automation? Yeah sure. But the idea that they will be perfect automated solutions applicable in all cases is just marketing, it’s not reality.

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#48

Post by wang_li » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 2:36 PM UTC

_pdp_ wrote: post #16

It will be solved when there is no more code left to write. Code is an abstract concept that is not bound to the physical world and I imagine that future will have some much more of it that it is difficult to comprehend. Everything will be code and more code will be written than ever before. Code will never going to be solved. The question is how much humans will be involved and I think the evidence is that perhaps j…

Code and software and applications are an intermediate stage. The final stage is an AI/LLM that just does the thing that is needed without any code being written, there are no applications or programs, just an AI that does everything.

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#49

Post by esafak » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 2:36 PM UTC

marginalia_nu wrote: post #21

victorbjorklund wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. And not fair comparisons ”look at the quality of this small one-shot Claude hobby project. The quality is less than this major open source project written by some of the best developers in the world”

To be fair the pitch has frequently been that Devin/Claude/Astra/whatever is some sort of superhuman bottled John Carmack that will single-handedly replace entire teams of developers.

And it can -- if an able person wields it.

Re: Measuring the sloppiness of code

#50

Post by gedy » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 2:36 PM UTC

danbruc wrote: post #19

Coding is not solved, correctness is not a feature, it is the bare minimum. If your code does not do what it is supposed to do, you could as well have no code at all. Efficiency, security, maintainability, reliability, readability, understandability, extensibility, maintainability, observability, portability, ... this is what high quality coding is about, not that it works, that is a given. And in my experience curre…

"Coding" is just a poor term for this, as there's so much room to weasel different meanings out of it. At every company I've worked in past 20+ years the "coders" were engineering a product from wrong or unclear requirements and specs from non-technical people. The act of coding was secondary (but an important throttling function to make us stop and think about what is even possible or makes sense.) Never did FAANGs, so YMMV.

Really doubt we are near that being solved with non-technical folks + LLMs. I'm seeing people gleefully rebuilding products with the exact same blind spots in their understanding/logic using LLMs. Claude, etc are not seemingly able to "AGI" around goofy asks. The CSS looks a little nicer than their legacy products though, lol.