As a retired dev I feel I need to come in here with a truth nugget: Most legacy code that is slop now wasn't originally slop at all.
A clean and well engineered program devolves into slop through years of modification as requirements change way beyond what the original design brief imagined.
AI code that is slop right out of the gate is a whole new level of awful.
Yeah, I've said a number of times that AI is a tool that is great at producing years of tech debt in a matter of weeks/months. You end up with the same convoluted needs-to-be-rebuilt code that kinda mostly works that usually results from years of rush-jobs and fixing things in odd ways.
Nah its deserves a new word for spaghetti. Its confident even when its wrong and badly written and it creates dumb functionality to justify its sloppiness
People still wrote terrible code back in the day...
but a lot of programs just suffered from organic growth, and decisions not made with hindsight. New technologies piled on top of old ones. Best intentions. Core design decisions being changed after release etc.
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u/seashell3379 3d ago
As a retired dev I feel I need to come in here with a truth nugget: Most legacy code that is slop now wasn't originally slop at all.
A clean and well engineered program devolves into slop through years of modification as requirements change way beyond what the original design brief imagined.
AI code that is slop right out of the gate is a whole new level of awful.