> LLMs don’t know what it is
Of course they don't, they're probability/prediction machines, they don't "know" anything, not even that Paris is the capital of France. What they do "know" is that once someone writes "The capital of France is", the most likely tokens to come after that, is "Paris". But they don't understand the concept, nor anything else, just that probably 54123 comes after 6723 (or whatever the tokens are).
Once you understand this, I think it's easy to reason about why they don't understand code quality, why they couldn't ever understand it, and how you can make them output quality code regardless.
It is actually funny that current AI+Coding tools benefit a lot from domain context and other information along the lines of Domain-Driven Design (which was inspired by the pattern language of C. Alexander).
A few teams have started incorporating `CONTEXT.MD` into module descriptions to leverage this.
I think there is no real quality or fake quality, just quality. I am referencing the quality that Persig and C. Alexander have written about.
It’s… qualitative, so it’s hard to measure but easy to feel. Humans are really good at perceiving it then making objective decisions. LLMs don’t know what it is (they’ve heard about it and think they know).