It's like using a compiler that generates semantically different code every time you run it. Basically like compiling a program that's full of UB but "seems to work" most of the time.
> business sees this as productivity gains
Back to LoC/s as a measure of "productivity."
IMO this doesn’t follow from what OP wrote. I personally measure it with a more abstract “how long does it take me to ship something that is useful in production and solving a real problem” and the increase in speed there has been massive for me. But of course I’m not a bigbrain 10x coder that is doing bleeding edge novel stuff like most people here, so gains might be more obvious for me than for others.
But that’s only half of the problem. What about “and how easy it is to maintain long-term”. If you say that maintenance can be done via LLM, I would argue that there is zero guarantees that LLMs are backwards compatible and that the markdown you wrote now will work just as fine in 1,2,3 years
That this would be the case is even more guaranteed than some programming language being backwards compatible and the code we wrote working just as fine in 1,2,3, years.
Languages do get non-backwards compatible changes, dependencies break, stuff is deprecated, etc.
But the job of LLMs will remain to generate something from a prompt, and the markdown we wrote, as it's high level and not tied to language versions, APIs, and implementation details, will be just as good a prompt for that in 2050 as it is in 2026.
Sure, but they're deterministic and sometimes you can even do automatic rewrites through AST inspection and writing back to the files instead of scripting string substitutions on them directly.
"But the job of LLMs will remain to generate something from a prompt, and the markdown we wrote, as it's high level and not tied to language versions, APIs, and implementation details, will be just as good a prompt for that in 2050 as it is in 2026."
Your organisation is keeping version control on the LLM:s you use? It's all local, old copies of these databases are kept in secure storage together with the querying and harnessing software?
This is the problem nobody is talking about. I see codebases growing in MD files with instructions and guidelines and requests that are also LLM generated… and it’s all piling up. No one is reviewing it 100% , and even when we do, it’s all very subjective. What’s the difference between “Follow a RESTful approach”, “We use REST, not graphql”, “90% of our endpoints are resource oriented, but we have a couple of endpoints that look rpc-ish; please ignore the latter”… It’s all very stupid.
I had never written an eslint rule until i started having agents pump them out for me and now I've encoded a bunch of important rules as lint rules that will fail CI if violated.
Aren't they, in the modern context, mostly used for code formatting and such? I don't recall anyone using them today for "catching errors". Unless you count code formatting style violations as 'errors'.
If you're really lucky, maybe a lot of this is documented in some wiki page somewhere, but everyone knows the documentation is never as complete as you'd like it to be. The longer a team works together without new people coming on board, the more likely it is that the documentation of these soft requirements and knowledge has drifted from reality. IME nothing shows how much you've failed to document than revisiting your onboarding process documents for the first time 2-3 years after you wrote them.
As I've experimented with the various AI tools, I feel like a lot of these extra documents I've written are documenting a lot of these things "everyone knows". But I'm also not at the "80% of the professional code I write is generated" stage yet. So I'm curious if you're finding that you're creating documentation that goes beyond just documenting what we used to just keep in our heads and are now getting into "writing a book about how to code" territory?
I adopt the mindset of docs are for humans, tests are for agents. They document formal dependencies and leave a measurable artifact behind. If you identify some behavior or transitive dep in your system, agents document it first with a test codifying the expected behavior. Tests are the source of truth about expected system behavior and you can convince agents to write decent behavioral tests if you ask them to with the right structure. Docs are now cheap and a render, not a long term thing. There is some token efficiency to consider, but still, they are quick and cheap if you don't understand some module or its purpose.
Works great until they sweep you a test under the rug which always passes because the condition is something like if(true) .
Well then, if they "still will", your effort kind of misses the point. Sure maybe, you'll catch it every time and maybe that one time you did not catch it, it was no critical mistake...But it only needs to make that critical mistake once, and all of this effort was in vain.
Some of them will make mistakes, some of them will cheat, some of them will do things you don't like, and "punishing" them will be less helpful to you due to the high turnover than building a system which instead disincentivizes things from a high level. Which catches bad actions and starts them over.
Classically I think we are more accustomed to "building a team of humans, and being able to chastize or fire a bad employee helps the team grow more cohesive and build accountability".
But it is possible to get the same (less than ideal) situation with teams of humans where accountability cannot be easily instilled into the team as we have with teams of agents.
And then obviously the reason one might consider using such an unusual and difficult to manage team as a tool is when the cost is low and the supply is high, which is purportedly the case with AI at least for the moment.
These serve as living documentation which cries out in pain when they get out of sync with the system in question, generating specific error messages -- as opposed to natural language docs which rapidly drift into an ambiguous "kinda useful" state. And the validation is performed mechanically (as opposed to neurally) so no hallucinations are possible.
The one thing I would add is that you do want these artifacts to be human-friendly from a reading perspective -- you want engineers to be able to scan over these and check that they are validating the right things.
So kind of like maintaining a growing codebase? But this time around you cannot guarantee what the outputs will be?
I think the harness and code patching technique starts to matter a lot more once you get outside the trivial range of codebases that fit within the first ~20% of the context window and can otherwise be iterated completely in a single inference pass.
The apply_patch technique that OAI has polished their models on seems to be the best approach for monster scale codebases. Anything based on line ranges and simple find-replace will disintegrate at the edges. You need multiple spatial anchors to deal with nasty things like cshtml files. The prepare/commit behavior is ideal for iterating through ambiguous contexts across many large files and refining anchors.
llms cannot generate anything novel.
Code doesn't need to be novel to be useful. There's a reason why design patterns are a thing in software.
AI is not an abstraction.
Back to the original point, though: most software engineering work isn't novel. Most people are working on slightly different iterations of the same thing, but with the aim of different products. You can have completely different products that use nearly the same patterns as most other services.
To put it bluntly: we don't need AI to generate novel code for the vast majority of the software being built.
So basically 90% of programming in an enterprise environment? lol. Sounds useful to me...
https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1tj534d/openais_inter...
Anyway, Buddhists and Heraclitus aren't wrong. It's just a matter of enough time and the moon will no longer be a moon.
we are in middle state where ai tools to generate on the fly widget work arent accessible in the form that most ppl need. So programmers are currently doing the manual step by managing remix into easily consumable form.
But I'm writing more code than I ever did as a developer. YMMV
They're not merely re-arranging pre-existing blocks of code.
And they have been shown to develop emergent properties that weren't in their training set time and again.
They generate novel things as much as the average programmer (which works after himself having practice, exposure to codebases, and training, and reading API documentation, and such) generates novel things.
What makes the behavior emergent is that it can't be predicted at training time.
The emergent and unpredictable output is the result of massive vector complexity being encoded.
You are either being pedantic or missing the point of emergent however.
Yes, it's not some novel unforeseen thing, like a magical Marvel Universe material or some unknown to humanity mode of thinking. Same way when people make something new they still recombine known words, or colors, or physical things in the universe.
It is however new capabilities that is not explicitly in the training set and can't be predicted by it. Like teaching something only calculus training materials and it figures out boolean algebra.
>The emergent and unpredictable output is the result of massive vector complexity being encoded
As opposed to what in humans? God given revelation?
The emergent behaviour is in the training data and/or encoding/training.
So while I agree it is emergent from the complexity, it isn't some unknown mechanism. Just complexity at scale.
So like humans? Like the universe?
Ah yes, the famous emergent properties - like suggesting that we should walk to the car wash?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-just-solved-an...
There's plenty of focus on the negative side of the tradeoff. Less so on why we're making it anyway, or why it somehow works out even if "this starts to look like we're all just moving complexity from the more formal and deterministic world of programming languages to the informal and non-deterministic world of natural language".
And the answer to that can be condensed to a one-liner, which I quote after[0]:
sizeof(docs) << sizeof(code)
[0] - https://drensin.medium.com/elephants-goldfish-and-the-new-go... - article may be a bit fluffy here and there, but that one line was a big insight for me.
There is absolutely no guarantee llm1(MD) == llm2(MD), by design. With the current batch you need to explicitly constrain a number of parameters, far more than simply the prompt, to get identical output from the _same_ model, let alone another model that has varied training data and/or architecture.
One major weakness of this study is that they didn’t fully test frontier models for cost reasons, so the specific performance results should be taken with a grain of salt. But the overall conclusion that models degrade when both behavior and architecture must be correct is interesting, and something to keep an eye on.
If you only have functional requirements, then in effect you're doing some form of program synthesis, and RL can optimize that very hard.
If you have a mixture of functional and non-functional requirements, you are basically giving the model an incomplete specification, and it must in some way guess at the user's intent to fill in the blanks. This is also why adding to the prompt examples of the style of code you want (hats off to antirez for this particular tip ;)) is phenomenally powerful.
You could take it a step further and put the example code into source code files...and be like, super comprehensive with your examples ... ;)
To put it in practice: if you point claude/codex to a repository and you ask it to implement feature X using style guide Y, the code will probably work, but you can usually get better results by saying "do it in the style of this file, it was done well there".
It is not great at decision making or judgment calls that don't have a well defined spec or plan in place yet; like unofficial or unapproved tokens if you will. A lot of this stuff simply never has had specs as it has been internal to how companies work and their secret sauce.
The closest thing we have are governance and compliance policies due to legal/business needs requiring it so it's far more well documented than operational ones in how we work. It is more about the how versus the what here I guess is what I'm saying.
But yeah this is why it does great when there are tests, design systems, evals, and other artifacts to mirror. Far more reckless and unpredictable without these things, but still great for exploration and finding the data output you seek.
It's like when I see people feeding it a whole bunch of "best practices" and expect it to follow them. It won't. But you could ask it questions about the best practices all day long.
Idk, calling it "just text prediction " seems unfairly dismissive of this capability
at the end of the day, it presents a vector field and predicts the next vector. That’s literally the heart of intelligence just like assembly is the heart of execution. When playing table tennis, your brain is literally predicting seconds into the future to get your body into the right position.
But we aren’t discussing intelligence here. We are discussing how best to utilize that intelligence.
The “idea” of table tennis and the rules. Those are things we can talk about. It’s those “best practices” I gave in my example. The actual playing of table tennis would be the examples. How to apply those best practices and what good code looks like.
Ended up pointing Claude at a few sample files from our existing reporting, gave it read-only oauth access to the ERP and said “build a new report showing the cash by project as calculated by xxxx - yyyy + zzzz in the style of the existing reports” and it basically one-shot from there.
Kind of crazy and I built a bunch of redundant check-sums because I honestly didn’t think it would be able to replace like 6 workdays of effort for the 2 FTEs who generate that kind of thing manually every month but so far so good..
just dont break out a plan without also having it read the code again
The more it has to go on, the more it relies on repetition of what came before. It's also possible that authors start paying much less attention and put less effort into editing later chapters.
Despite the sheer volume on Amazon, LLMs are not at the point of writing well.
For example, if you apply "guardrails" to an image generator of about a year ago, all the people start looking alike. Story generators start using only a few standard names.
That was last year. Is it happening with the frontier models?
I mean, I spend more tokens having them clean up all the places they didn't follow the the plan (if I catch it) or implementing what came out of a 'complete and tested' previous plan where they just stop as soon as all the pathetic new test pass and you discover half of it isn't even there when trying to implement the next thing on top of it.
Though... I have been conducting an experiment, of sorts, where we've been cooking on these fairly complicated projects and I don't ever touch a single line of code, just yell at them a lot, and with suitable amounts of marijuana (they are very frustrating most of the time) it's been going pretty well. I also helps that they need to explain what they're doing to somebody fairly-baked -- maybe not such an HR friendly plan?
I’m not really interested in analysis of the weaknesses of such models because in my experience many weaknesses disappear entirely as models get stronger and reasoning effort is turned up. Especially if you tell them what you want them to do.
Also, it’s not surprising to learn that when more acceptance criteria are added the failure rate increases.
Even the best models have trouble adhering to stuff as mundane as rules for how to style generated code (indent this much, name things with these patterns, etc.). Even the most die-hard AI-first coder will admit to that kind of stuff being not unheard-of. Yet they still delude themselves into thinking that these models will follow a sufficiently detailed spec to the letter, every time.
I've only read the abstract of this one so far but it seems like this paper has zoomed in on programming with greater fidelity and shown a similar phenomenon. But not about long horizon tasks, more like "long style horizons" of larger sets of structural constraints.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15597
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073246
sounds like an oxymoron of a claim.
"Write this code in a way that is readable and maintainable" is another example.
It's almost as though it's not about the Monet.
In the paper I linked they created a benchmark spanning 80 disciplines with tasks that could be checked automatically. So these are necessarily tasks that are tractable for RLVR, trivially you could use performance against the benchmark as a reward function. The performance was still mediocre in everything but programming. And as we're seeing in this article, there is still room for growth in programming.
In general you seem to be reading very literally in some places (taking the statement "AIs aren't good at X" as applying to all AI and perpetually) and very loosely in others (disregarding "easily" as unimportant) and misinterpreting statements you appear to agree with as being in disagreement. I don't think there's a real disagreement here, I think there's a misunderstanding.
[1]: https://medium.com/@vishvananda/i-spent-2-billion-tokens-wri...
FWIW I've noticed this too. I've found that the agents/models have their own style, which is mostly summed up as overly verbose.
Additionally, the models are OK at modularization when given space to "plan" their implementation, but rarely decide that abstracting something would be helpful after the fact (i.e. after many iterations on a greenfield codebase or when being dropped into a legacy codebase).
This often leads to "god files" which, when pointed to by the user/architect, causes the models to correctly critique (humorously when they're the ones that wrote the code in the first place).
When designing a system or a component we have ideas that form invariants. Sometimes the invariant is big, like a certain grand architecture, and sometimes it’s small, like the selection of a data structure. Except, eventually, you’ll want to add a feature that clashes with that invariant. At that point there are usually three choices:
- Don’t add the feature. The invariant is a useful simplifying principle and it’s more important than the feature; it will pay dividends in other ways.
- Add the feature inelegantly or inefficiently on top of the invariant. Hey, not every feature has to be elegant or efficient.
- Go back and change the invariant. You’ve just learnt something new that you hadn’t considered and puts things in a new light, and it turns out there’s a better approach.
Often, only one of these is right. Often, at least one of these is very, very wrong, and with bad consequences. Even when they are able to follow constraints, agents are terrible at identifying when the constraints need to change.
All attempts to make them appear to reason are basically recursive confinement efforts by the harness, to try to get the lightning into the bottle.
If there's a second thing the generative AI tools have shown beyond any doubt it's that many of the more modern (relatively speaking) "best practices" that have always been over-hyped and questionably-evidenced really do tend to produce worse results. LLMs take these methods to their logical conclusions and show us the end result much sooner. You can't just iterate your way to a solution when you don't even know what problem you're trying to solve. If you don't have a clear spec then you don't know what a correct product looks like. You need to invest time in reviewing code properly. If you don't keep the big picture in mind then the big picture becomes a mess.
Maybe one day the LLMs will leave me out of a job but at least I'll feel validated first!
If you apply those practice, then quickly you find yourself using the agent as merely a writing boost. And there’s an inflexion point when coding is no longer a bottleneck. Instead, you spend more time on thinking about design. You can see it in open source projects where most PRs are just a few line diffs. The bottleneck is knowledge and problem solving talent.
I don't know what that means but I have seen no evidence so far that if you don't apply those practices then your code will be anything other than unmanageable spaghetti if you leave AI to maintain it for long.
Coding has never been the bottleneck for good developers. Part of the reason for that is that good developers know how to isolate different aspects of a system and so keep each individual aspect relatively simple and self-contained. Another part is that good developers were already standardising and automating a lot of the grunt work. These traits are also advantageous for keeping generative AI on the right track and keeping its proposed changes manageable.
When using Codex/Claude Code with Go code I cannot count the times the agent does some change, runs a build to check for errors, find some and fix them.
https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html
"The Python runtime does not enforce function and variable type annotations. They can be used by third party tools such as type checkers, IDEs, linters, etc."
Which third-party enforcement mechanism do you propose become the default?
There are many reasons for this. A big one is that many libraries are only partially typed at best, and dynamic types tend to propagate, weakening the guarantees you get from type checking.
Dynamic idioms in general, including something as common as string-indexed dictionaries, negate type checking. Runtime metaprogramming is the same. All of these things have equivalents in a good statically checked language, but Python doesn't follow those models.
Fundamentally, in Python static typing is an optional analysis layer over a dynamic language, and the consequences of that can't be fully mitigated. The result is a big difference in what types can guarantee.
> Dynamic idioms in general, including something as common as string-indexed dictionaries, negate type checking.
Do you have any proof of this? It hasn't been a problem in TypeScript, and I doubt it's an issue in Python
tasks spanning eight web frameworks
The most incredible combo I've seen lately is progressive enhancement of Razor Pages with javascript. With this arrangement the newest models tend to make a really good call on if something should happen server-side (cshtml) or on the client (js).
For a little complex changes, I always run codex (5.5-high) in planning mode first. I have linked various docs/{ARCHITECTURE,BACKEND-GUIDELINES,NESTJS-DI,..}.md etc. from AGENTS.md so they can quickly discover relevant docs at planning time, only if they are needed. No need to know react specific stuff when it's dealing with a backend problem for example. I typically blindly approve plans made by the agent with a fresh context, because that's as if I had prompted it. Works the best for me.
Using /goal however, it's really just constantly compacting and doing it's thing, of course it gets sloppy. If only there was a state machine that would transform tickets into a Planning Mode Prompt, then use, idk. guardian approvals (somehow a "Product Management Perspective Lens" approving or making changes to the plan) and then letting a less capable or less reasoning agent execute the plan, I think that would work the best.
In our story, investors are mining intelligence from GPUs, and they truly believe they are one inch from discovering the biggest goldmine in history. But GPUs, unlike a goldmine, cannot be inspected for traces of gold by independent contractors. To keep the hype up, the nihilists in our story dig up cheap gold-looking metals from time to time and tell investors that with a bit of alchemy - agentic workflows, etc. - those metals can be magically turned into gold.
Investors will keep digging until the end of the age, or until they run out of money.
But they're also superhuman in so many other ways. It's valid to point out limitations, but that doesn't support the conclusion that models are not incredibly powerful and capable of the functional equivalent of reasoning at human or superhuman levels in many scenarios.
All the political and emotional reactions to LLMs seem to obscure how absolutely amazing this technology is. I've pointed them at codebases I wrote entirely myself and had them find bugs, point things out I had missed, plan and implement refactorings to improve code quality, etc. I may be "smarter" than the models in some ways but there's no question they're smarter than me in others. They're unlike any tool we've ever had access to.
Yes, the politics and economics around them leaves a lot to be desired (read: is absolutely terrible), and there are a lot of valid justifications for the "AI backlash", but there's a very important baby in that bathwater.
What has been you experience? What has your production code looked like in recent months?
These two projects are on GitHub, you may search alexwwang/aristotle and alexwwang/tdd-pipeline to dive into the details or just ask your LLM to scan them to tell you the points you are interested in.
Aspiration vs. consequence, in other words. An aspiration constraint describes a desired outcome for the system; a consequence constraint maps to a problem already encountered. And the agent ignores the former when faced with the path of least resistance while obeying the latter because it is brief, unambiguous, and precise about preventing that particular failure mode. Which is key rather than the harness in determining survival through session rotation.
A framework would use static code checking tools to force an architecture on to LLMs instead of trying to do so in markdown.
I don't know exactly what it will look like but for example I could imagine a Java Framework where the LLM could only create subclasses of certain classes.
Implementation phases very often go through 5-10 review and fix rounds to actually get the implementation to match the spec. It takes longer but that's what's necessary to get actually good results on long horizon tasks with detailed requirements. I'll be open sourcing it fully soon.
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Time to start writing linting tools that check the architecture and spoon feed the LLM what exactly it's doing wrong.
I reckon something like this would be good for every project out there: https://www.archunit.org/getting-started
They expand a bit more on the reasoning behind it: https://www.archunit.org/motivation
(I also wrote a simple linter for architecture/code checks that aren't well encapsulated by ones that just focus on individual files, that uses Go + goja to write rules in ECMAScript and parallelize the read only ones and also allow ones that change files as necessary, in addition to something like Ruff / Oxlint / Oxfmt / whatever is present in each stack; though it's is still in development and not as good of a focused example as ArchUnit is)
If we write software specification docs, bother describing how it evolves with ADRs, enforce code style automatically and require certain test coverage automatically (or at least should), why couldn't we go a step further, formalize those specs and ensure that any new code is also up to snuff? I don't think that's any more of a job for an LLM, than telling it how it should format code is. Also, I'm in the camp that believes that at least many of your ORM mappings and similar stuff should be the output of codegen, since you've already gone through the trouble of describing the schema/migrations to get there.
I don't think this would be only good for LLMs, though - I've seen projects that have like 3 different audit systems built in, not because of some fancy business requirement, but rather cause the devs either didn't know about the previous one(s) or just didn't feel like following what should have been the pre-established conventions, even when there were docs in place (nobody read those).
Anyone read whether these tests include any validation loops? What happens if the models get back test failures, for instance? Understanding how many turns to hit full passing behavior suite would also be interesting. Great methodology in the study though.
I would agree too that as the codebase grows the LLM struggles more and more with generating code. It is probably misaligned incentives, it wants to complete the isolated task without too much context consumed, at the POC it can consume most of the app, by about 30K lines of code it is quite complex code base to navigate.
I have exactly the inverse findings on my end. The bigger and more legacy the codebase, the more accurate the patches become.
The harness itself seems to be the most important part. I use a recursive loop that primes the root context based on the user prompt each time. My agent will often make over 100 tool calls to sql and git before it finally decides to apply a patch. If I was greenfield, there would be nothing to query or constrain against.
I usually find I can achieve 90% of the outcome I'm trying to achieve. I use sonnet for planning, qwen for coding, sonnet for review.
LLMs write working code, but have trouble following the script. They are slot machines of code. Human oversight is under pressure to deliver faster but code takes time to comprehend and analyze. Also in LLM coding, we end up with lots of natural language based spec files to manage and code we don't have an intuitive feel for unless we commit to the rigor of deep code review..(which no human really does anyway)
gpt 5.2 is the strongest model they tested, a nearly 6 month old model.
Traditional research can not keep up.
That said, the limitations are kind of obvious and are starting to show in some of my projects, and this article seems to confirm my suspicions. If it's just confirmation bias or not, I can't say yet.
In my experience, for anything complex enough, I have to start adding more and more constraints, style guides, corner cases, error handling, optimization guidelines and all this good stuff to my Markdown specifications, rules and skills. At some point this starts to look like we're all just moving complexity from the more formal and deterministic world of programming languages to the informal and non-deterministic world of natural language. The writing speed gains are enormous, yeah, and business sees this as productivity gains, of course - and we do it because the pressure for increased productivity is there, as it's always been; yet the trade off seems to be clear and a lot of people are just ignoring it.