Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S...
by benjiro29 on Saturday November 14, 2026 @07:34AM
(#50496543)
There is this false economy with "o, LLM can not find a lot of bugs in X software, that means human code better"... Overlooking that this software may have had 10, 15, 30+ years of non-stop issue being reported and fixed, by a ton of people.
So when a LLM writes new software and the LLM sweeps keep finding a ton of issues. Yea, but the LLM wrote that code in a few hours, what may have been weeks of work. The sweeps its running is finding things, that may have taken years to remove as customers report issues.
Combined with LLMs tend to "over find" issue things that we will never bother with as human written code. We may say "too trivial to fix, not a issue", ... bla bla but for a LLM its a issue to fix, so it looks like LLM code has more issues.
And while we may pat ourselves on our back for finding X bug that created data loss or a crash, there is probably a dozen high to medium bugs hidden somewhere to be found by the customers (yikes!). Where as LLMs then to reduce that vector after a sweep to barely a few medium or low items.
This is what i always need to tell people. LLMs are not just doing the work of humans at a 10x faster speed, they are also solving bugs and other issues what may have taken years for humans to iron out, what a LLM does in maybe a 24h bug hunt session.
it’s all very much over-eager junior level.
You have not seen the over smart senior dev that tries to one-liner everything. Or that makes code so complex, that its a "job secure" feature because nobody else can figure out what the ** is going on.
I noticed that there is this perception that medium or senior devs are the panicle of coding, and good practices when most are not. A lot of are simply restrained because companies force specific coding standards and left to their own devices, they will love to run amuck. Remove those handrails and your going to see code that makes most LLMs blush. lol
after some thought it will give me 15 to 30 suggestions of what needs fixing.
That simply means that your collogues never bothered to run a bug hunt sweep after their work. If they did so, just like a human dev writing something and having the work checked by another dev, this will have been reduced a minimum. People seem to have this thinking that LLMs need to write perfect code from the start, when its trained on our human code, with all its issues. Just like if we wrote code manually, and then somebody checks the code before pushing and committing it, do the same for LLM code.
!!! LLM do not mean that good coding and deployment practices are suddenly useless !!!
So when a LLM writes new software and the LLM sweeps keep finding a ton of issues. Yea, but the LLM wrote that code in a few hours, what may have been weeks of work. The sweeps its running is finding things, that may have taken years to remove as customers report issues.
Combined with LLMs tend to "over find" issue things that we will never bother with as human written code. We may say "too trivial to fix, not a issue", ... bla bla but for a LLM its a issue to fix, so it looks like LLM code has more issues.
And while we may pat ourselves on our back for finding X bug that created data loss or a crash, there is probably a dozen high to medium bugs hidden somewhere to be found by the customers (yikes!). Where as LLMs then to reduce that vector after a sweep to barely a few medium or low items.
This is what i always need to tell people. LLMs are not just doing the work of humans at a 10x faster speed, they are also solving bugs and other issues what may have taken years for humans to iron out, what a LLM does in maybe a 24h bug hunt session.
it’s all very much over-eager junior level.
You have not seen the over smart senior dev that tries to one-liner everything. Or that makes code so complex, that its a "job secure" feature because nobody else can figure out what the ** is going on.
I noticed that there is this perception that medium or senior devs are the panicle of coding, and good practices when most are not. A lot of are simply restrained because companies force specific coding standards and left to their own devices, they will love to run amuck. Remove those handrails and your going to see code that makes most LLMs blush. lol
after some thought it will give me 15 to 30 suggestions of what needs fixing.
That simply means that your collogues never bothered to run a bug hunt sweep after their work. If they did so, just like a human dev writing something and having the work checked by another dev, this will have been reduced a minimum. People seem to have this thinking that LLMs need to write perfect code from the start, when its trained on our human code, with all its issues. Just like if we wrote code manually, and then somebody checks the code before pushing and committing it, do the same for LLM code.
!!! LLM do not mean that good coding and deployment practices are suddenly useless !!!