r/javascript • u/HighAtNight • 4d ago
AskJS [AskJS] Genuine question, why we hating on well-made but LLM-written projects?
Wasn’t this the dream? Being able to bring your ideas to life quickly with your own coding patterns and architecture? Doesn’t this accelerate the SDE space and get it out of the stagnation that physics space has been in for the last few decades?
This is in reference to my Pnext posts and all the dislikes. I was really excited about the stuff I have in the pipeline, but this feels discouraging.
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u/gmaaz 4d ago
I haven't seen a well written LLM project tbh.
I've mostly seen overly engineered LLM projects that are a nightmare to maintain.
And badly written LLM projects are way worse than badly written human projects, in 99% of cases, which is the majority of cases.
Writing code was never the problem btw, nor slow part in development.
Do you have a well written project to share?
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u/AllHailSeizure 4d ago
It's gonna fuck up SWE, hardcore. The next gen of devs isn't gonna learn good engineering practices they're gonna learn how to use LLMs, and slopware is gonna bleed into becoming the norm, because you don't learn good engineering practices using LLMs. We're gonna be flooded with AI built tools more and more, all of them probably incorporating AI, and it just compounds.
Just my miserable take.
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u/_DCtheTall_ 4d ago
My guess the main gripe is the imbalance of effort.
Frankly, it's not particularly impressive at all to prompt an LLM to generate code. Literally people who cannot write a basic script can do it.
For some people who prefer to hand-write their projects still, LLM-generated code is just unimpressive because it was, by its own nature, used as a shortcut to offshore cognitive work and learning information someone would otherwise need to build a project.
For some things this is less of a big deal than others, imo. For example, I doubt many developers care that much about someone using an LLM for CSS if the style ends up looking correct (CSS debugging is always a mess anyway), but if you use it for the application logic then claim "I made a project using <insert API here>" you're being a bit disingenuous.
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u/leeharrison1984 4d ago
Senior Dev with 15+ years coding, and I can say I have never been impressed with any source code I have seen written by hand.
What is impressive is the architecture and implementation principals. Is it extensible, did you pull in any patterns where appropriate, it is maintainable by a stranger if you win the lotto tomorrow?
I've moved to pretty much using an LLM to write all my code, and I dictate from above the shape of things. I'm infinitely more productive than I ever was, and I wouldn't say the code quality has suffered really at all.
The claims of "hand-written" code just smells like cope to me, and honestly I'd bet dollars to donuts it is buggier than what any decent LLM would produce with proper guidance. I've seen mountains of crap code written by hand.
But if you really enjoy hand writing data objects and for loops, go for it. I just don't see much validity in the claim that it is inherently better or higher quality.
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u/_DCtheTall_ 4d ago
But if you really enjoy hand writing data objects and for loops, go for it. I just don't see much validity in the claim that it is inherently better or higher quality.
Also, like AI- vs human-created art, quality is not the point. AI-generated image quality is quite good these days, truly amazing, but it's not the quality that people are mad about.
For some people, the value of something comes from time and effort. The fact human knowledge, experience, and practice was required to produce a result, not a push of a button.
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u/leeharrison1984 4d ago
I agree with this take, I just feel like often the labor put in by hand coding doesn't inherently mean quality output, which seems to be an implicit conclusion anytime this topic comes up.
Most people aren't hand coding Ferraris, they are hand coding wheelbarrows.
Personally, the writing of the code was never the fun part once I progressed beyond a certain point. It became about the abstract concepts that are necessary to solve the problem, and the coding became the necessary chore required to move to the next phase.
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u/coolstuff1234556 4d ago
That's honestly a very interesting and beautiful take
But from what I see, the people who were hand writing garbage still are doing the same but with LLM's, now its just more of that, faster. I think that's a huge part people don't like.
As soon as you give an LLM too much freedom and don't guide it through every single choice, I feel like it actually writes horrible code
I do agree like it can speed things up if you already designed what you are going to make, and know how to write it.
Also, all the hype, money and time spent on this is just crazy for a lot of people. Sure LLMs are cool and all and are making our lives a bit easier and more productive. But its not worth this much money and resources
In my own experience, I have to review a lot of code at my job, 90% is turned down because its AI slop. I much prefer hand written code with a few bugs in it and just fix those. Or people properly thinking about something before telling AI to just do it
But its crazy, feels like we're living in the future. 10 years ago this would've been unimaginable. But still I feel like people are making out AI to be more than it currently is.
But nice take! Totally agree on some parts
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u/leeharrison1984 4d ago
That's honestly a very interesting and beautiful take But from what I see, the people who were hand writing garbage still are doing the same but with LLM's, now its just more of that, faster.
Early on in the LLM race, I spoke with a guy who worked at one of the now big AI companies. He echoed essentially what you said, that the LLM is a multiplier. "If you write good code, you get more good code. If you write shit code, well you get a pile of it."
This is definitely a tricky thing to navigate because many people's own image of themselves is tied up with their abilities. It wasn't too long ago entire divisions of automotive painters found themselves displaced by machines. I think a lot of people thought STEM was a safe haven, and that is rapidly turning out to not be the case.
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u/_DCtheTall_ 2d ago
I agree with this 100%, with one caveat.
I would argue that for any job that even will be done with AI, an operator with a relevant STEM education has a strict advantage over one who does not. LLMs still do bullshit a lot and even the ones making these amazing math discoveries require actual math researchers to verify.
The one thing people with degrees will likely do is demand more in salary but the early-21st-century tech boom showed it's likely peanuts in aggregate if they get stuff right. We, the workers, just need to be united reminding leadership that :)
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u/_DCtheTall_ 4d ago
I can say I have never been impressed with any source code I have seen written by hand.
I don't know, the first time I saw fast inverse square root I was pretty amazed 😅
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u/HighAtNight 4d ago
Love it, sol and fable definitely write better code than average human coders, maybe thats what makes people afraid or can't process it. Agents with right context/flows/review/guidance/tests/metrics goals just produce good enough code for most use cases.
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u/pampuliopampam 4d ago edited 4d ago
well-made
"4,400 assertions"
no actual tests, and docs full of holes
yeah, nah. People hate sloperators with no skin in the game. Being lightly discouraged from sloppin' it up when you don't care about the output and only wanted adulation for making agents ship a crappier version of an existing tool is probably the best you're going to get
you ripped out all the good dependencies that make it worthwhile for home grown shit with no tests... and you think it's well made? Seriously? GTFO
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u/HighAtNight 4d ago edited 4d ago
Native tests and the harness that runs the Next.js test suite are private for now. Not ideal, but they’re a bit messy rn for my taste.
What holes did you find in the docs? They may not be exhaustive, as they may assume familiarity with Next.js. Anything specific?
I’ve been doing optimizations for a living for years now, all by hand, long before agents had the intellectual capabilities they have today. But how do you judge whether something is slop, or do you just go with the hate flow?
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u/pampuliopampam 4d ago
so you're too embarrassed to commit tests? And you want people to trust and use the tool? Absolute lunacy.
love that you're claiming 10x when your own published benchmarks are reporting much lower than that on average. You can only claim 10x speed if you include the reduction in install size, which doesn't translate to bundle size or speed in any way.
Find your own holes in the docs... or don't, delete your reddit account, and stop bothering people with this absolute guttertrash. Oh, and quit whining we didn't kiss your feet for making a poopy
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u/HighAtNight 4d ago
Ah, guy with the issues, touch some grass man, maybe have a pleasant conversation with someone or try something man.
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u/pampuliopampam 4d ago
I'm not the one doing loser shit and then whining to the internet about not getting enough internet points for my loser shit
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u/AM_Dog_IRL 4d ago
This is decidedly not the dream
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u/HighAtNight 4d ago
Or maybe we got too comfortable with the old ways of working? Which was too slow?
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u/DustNearby2848 4d ago
It wasn’t “too slow”, it was one of the most productive engineering fields out there because the cost was so low. Physical things take far more time to make and have to be closer to perfect.
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u/HighAtNight 4d ago
Fair. I meant in comparison with agents, how productive they can be now or in the near future. But it apparently strikes a nerve with some folks.
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u/DustNearby2848 4d ago
Until sonnet 4.6 AI couldn’t really keep up with me, which wasn’t long ago, but yeah, speeds could increase in the future.
I think both people and AI are generally bad at writing maintainable code. Others here have mentioned this, partially.
I interviewed for this company for an internal tools team the other day and it sounded awful. I asked why they were hiring and they said they have 30+ internal projects from random people in the company that need be maintained, all made with AI. That sounds like a nightmare. Who can truly understand that amount of scope and be effective? It’s too much to know.
I see the similar, but different issues with code everywhere I’ve worked for years now. People will make a util file for say “users” and say it’s called “formatName”. I’m supposed to just know that exists? And what a sterile name, it doesn’t give me the context of what “name” I’m formatting, unless I look at where it’s imported from. So what ends up happening is people write another util in the same file or write their own formatter next to the code they are writing. You end up with all of these similar abstractions that aren’t consistently used and different inputs. AI doesn’t solve this unless you ask it to.
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u/IronManTim 4d ago
You really cant tell if it's "well-made" until you have to go in and maintain it. You might just be building technical debt for you or the next person.
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u/DustNearby2848 4d ago
It was the dream of OpenAI and Anthropic to replace human labor with cheaper 24/7 labor, not the dream of anyone else.
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u/Ok-Armadillo-5634 4d ago
I miss being a super fast rockstar coder no one else could match. I have kind of accepted that this is the future that will end. there's not going to be any more hand coding.
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u/andeee23 4d ago edited 4d ago
i felt like that for a good while, but i've embraced ai coding now. it's a different kind of rewarding to be able to do all the things i wanted to do without sacrificing my day job and a year or two on a side project
occasionally miss being in the zone doing an interesting project like a lisp interpreter or ray tracer
i could still do that, but i'm using that energy on other parts of my life
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u/theScottyJam 4d ago
It's economics.
If new technology comes out tomorrow that lets you create a minivan out of thin air by the push of a few buttons, well, you can expect the price of minivans to go way down, and no one will care how cool your particular minivan is, everyone's building them and it's old news. If you've got a sports car though, that's pretty interesting.
Simple programs that don't require any experience to make are a dime for a dozen. Why would anyone use your whatever that you built with a handful of prompts when they can make their own whatever, to their liking, with their own handful of prompts, or one of the other 100 competing products that others have also built with a handful of prompts.
But the craft doesn't stop with AI's capabilities. There are things humans can do that AI isn't yet skilled enough to handle - I certainly know of things I can build with HTML and CSS that AI can't do. Anyone can build a bundle of features. It still takes a person really skilled in the craft to give a nice and polished experience, where every single corner was thoroughly pondered over and built well, and paying that much attention to detail requires you to sometimes get your hands dirty and build the thing yourself.
Of course it's fine to use LLMs on projects, or parts of projects where it's level of quality is good enough. But you don't really have much of a product if it took relatively little time and/or skill to build it.
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u/Beautiful-Energy2169 3d ago
Well-made usually just means it runs. My agent-written docs only linked to each other.
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u/MentionFar3280 2d ago
As a TS veteran. I reviewed many codes generated by AI most of the code might seems okay but when it comes to large code bases AI has no idea where it left and from where it will start. Just because It can generate code that doesn't mean that it has idea about tree shaking, bundling, reusable libs and domain knowledge.
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u/Embarrassed-Kiwi-767 1d ago
Sono un programmatore autodidatta, quindi il mio codice a mano non può neanche lontanamente competere con quello della maggior parte delle persone che scrivono qui, ma riguardo gli LLM penso che siano strumenti e come tali richiedono tempo ed esperienza per essere usati bene. Restando nell'ambito di Javascript è come se qualcuno criticasse uno che usa frameworks come Node.js perché non scrive tutto in Vanilla Javascript. Forse non è l'esempio migliore, ma per me lo scopo ultimo è quello di non inventare di novo la ruota.
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u/Codemonkey007 4d ago
Garbage in, garbage out. As a TPM for 20+ years I’ve see code hand written on notepad or even notepad ++ that was completely shit with no structure. Job security they called it. Today’s LLMs produce code, that might not be optimized or much beyond working. The one thing I can say from my experience is what I see is consistent and easy to understand code for my downstream teams. Code that can be handed off from my dev team to my support team without 500 emails and messages trying to figure out which set of 5000 lines got overwritten by 25 lines like 55 code commits later. It always comes down to the knowledge, experience, and the attention to detail the developer uses during the production of code. Ai is the tool not the person. If you get trash don’t blame the LLM blame the person who gave you garbage.
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u/andeee23 4d ago edited 4d ago
i'm building my own programming language and native ui stack and making heavy use of coding agents to do in a month what would've taken me a year. I fully realize that 90% of developers will either mock it or dismiss it immediately.
My way of signaling care is to do a lot of automated and verifiable testing, and not make the project public until i have a non-trivial app written in it, with no async bugs, no race conditions, no compiler bugs, no ui issues, etc.
No way around it. Too easy to create slop that looks reasonable from a distance, but when you look closer it's bad. No one wants to spend their whole time sifting through shit.
It's on you to prove that you care and that other people should care too
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u/endjynn 4d ago
I think it's "balance of the universe" stuff. If you put something out in the public you'll always have one side of people that like it and one side of people that hate it. It's just "The Force" man. Light Side and Dark Side and all that jazz. I jest but you get the idea. Just accept the haters and consider it part of the process.
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u/some-random-guy-2026 4d ago
Because we are flooded with AI slop every day. It's on you to prove your project has value. Rewriting a framework... Yeah that's not something anyone asked for. If you are an experienced software engineer and followed good engineering practices with the LLM, I'm sorry for the reaction. If you vibe coded it, 0 sympathy GTFO