Lots of devs complaining about code quality and understandability here.
I'm going to skip the obvious answer about how LLMs can actually improve code quality and reviewability and focus on a different argument: why engineers even care about code quality.
Most code is not written as a work of art but as an important functional piece to achieve return on capital. Programmers get paid by companies to produce code. The payment ultimately is driven by expectation of a return on investment of the code. Ultimately business owners and owners do not really care about code quality as long as it can deliver on return on capital. There are plenty of profitable businesses run on spaghetti code and old technology. However, engineers realized that bad code resulted in costly downstream consequences including consequences that affected ROI. Tech debt had to be paid not just in developer hours but also dollars and cents. Thus this obsession with code quality, code reviews, and this current debate.
Many including Andrew Ng at YC startup school recently are realizing that writing bad code is now a two way door instead of the one way door that it used to be. With LLMs you can deploy some bad code, realize it's bad, and rewrite that entire codebase tomorrow with near negligible cost. The fact that LLM can write some very very bad code is less important than the return on invested capital of that code especially when taking into account the speed at which that code can be fixed / completely re-written in the future, and especially when that in that future, LLMs will be even more capable than it is now.
Here's my advice: give in the shitty code and merge it. Claude 6 will refactor all of it to your liking very soon.
I'm going to skip the obvious answer about how LLMs can actually improve code quality and reviewability and focus on a different argument: why engineers even care about code quality.
Most code is not written as a work of art but as an important functional piece to achieve return on capital. Programmers get paid by companies to produce code. The payment ultimately is driven by expectation of a return on investment of the code. Ultimately business owners and owners do not really care about code quality as long as it can deliver on return on capital. There are plenty of profitable businesses run on spaghetti code and old technology. However, engineers realized that bad code resulted in costly downstream consequences including consequences that affected ROI. Tech debt had to be paid not just in developer hours but also dollars and cents. Thus this obsession with code quality, code reviews, and this current debate.
Many including Andrew Ng at YC startup school recently are realizing that writing bad code is now a two way door instead of the one way door that it used to be. With LLMs you can deploy some bad code, realize it's bad, and rewrite that entire codebase tomorrow with near negligible cost. The fact that LLM can write some very very bad code is less important than the return on invested capital of that code especially when taking into account the speed at which that code can be fixed / completely re-written in the future, and especially when that in that future, LLMs will be even more capable than it is now.
Here's my advice: give in the shitty code and merge it. Claude 6 will refactor all of it to your liking very soon.