If My Name Is on the PR, I'm Reading the Clanker's Code
I Read the Clankers' Code
A 20-year software engineer pushes back on the advice to let AI agents write code unsupervised. When your name is on the pull request and your pager is in the on-call rotation, you own whatever the model produces. Clankers write fast and often well, but they work by addition, never learn from mistakes, and bury codebases in redundant tests and invented features. Until real control mechanisms exist, review the code.
Clankers don't learn. They can't, because the underlying technology cannot learn.
- JohnMakin
> But you don’t care about code quality anymore right.
Why did we ever? Because it made it more feasible to maintain and reduced bugs. Well structured, designed code bases are simply far easier to work with.
I'm sure we've all had greenfield AI projects where we just let it go nuts doing whatever it wants, then all of a sudden you need what should be a stupid easy change, and it just falls over completely or becomes borderline impossible. Each change needs 5+ other changes until you basically can't touch the thing. The difference is, AI will keep trying until you run out of money or you give up, but this way of programming is bad and we labeled it bad for a reason, and I don't know why as an industry we're thinking it's no longer important.
- voidnullvalue
"We need formalized processes, and proven, repeatable control mechanisms to enforce the quality of whatever is coming out of these tools. These do not exist yet. They might emerge one day, but they have not yet3. Until then, I won’t just lay into it blindly. If you consider yourself a software engineer, you should probably give it a minute too."
The same argument cuts both ways. I have seen some horrid code (that I have had to fix) made by humans.
- glitchc
In its current state, LLMs produce code that is on par with the average developer. This is not necessarily bad since most firms can only afford to hire average developers, the difference in quality is negligible. And on the flip side, by producing the code it does, AI also raises the floor by eliminating code smells typical of below-average developers, so there's that.