But is the code that bad?

There is, obviously and understandably, a lot of conversation online about AI and coding and agents and all that stuff. Much of it I get, much of it I agree with, I share the vast majority of the concerns. The impact on people, the impact on society, the impact on the environment, the impact on security... there's a good list of things to worry us there.

The one that crops up a lot though, that I don't quite get, is the constant claim I see that at best AI tools produce bad code, and at worst they produce unworkable code. That really isn't my recent experience.

Sure, going back to 2023 or 2024, when I first started toying with these new chatbot things some folks were raving about, the output was laughable. I can remember spending some fun times trying to coax whatever version of ChatGPT was on the go at the time into writing workable code and being amused by just how bad it was.

Even back in October last year, when I first tried out the free Copilot Pro that GitHub had given me to play with, I tried to get it to build a Textual application for me and it was terrible. The code was bad, it didn't really know how to use Textual properly, the application I was trying to get it to write as a test barely worked. It was a disaster.

A month later, in November of last year, I had a second go and better success. That time the (still not released, perhaps one day) application I was building was Swift-based and worked really well, but I can't really comment on the quality of the code or how idiomatically correct the code is in respect to the type of application it is (it's a wee game that runs on iOS, iPadOS, macOS).

By the time I tried my first serious experiment things seemed to be a little different. The code actually wasn't bad. It wasn't good, it was far from good, but it wasn't bad. Also, because it was Python, I was in a good place to judge the code.

Since I've started working on BlogMore I've noticed issues such as:

• Lots of repetitive boilerplate code.
• Lots of magic numbers.
• Lots of magic strings.
• Functions with redundant and unused parameters.
• A default state of just adding more and more code to one file.
• A habit of writing least-effort-possible type hints.
• A habit of sometimes taking a hacky shortcut to solve a problem.
• A habit of sometimes over-engineering a solution to a problem.
• A weird obsession with importing inside functions.
• An occasional weird obsession with guarding some imports with TYPE_CHECKING to work around non-existent circular imports.
• An unwillingness to use newer Python capabilities (I've yet to see it make use of := without being prompted, for example).
• A tendency to write what I would consider less-elegant code over more-elegant code.

The list isn't exhaustive, of course. The point here is that, as I've reviewed the PRs¹, and read the code, I've seen things I wouldn't personally do. I've seen things I wouldn't personally write, I've seen things I've felt the need to push back on, I've seen things I've fully rejected and started over. Ultimately BlogMore isn't the code I would have written, but at the moment it is the application I would have written².

So, here's the thing: every time I see someone writing a negative toot or post or article or whatever, and they talk about how the code it produces is unworkable, I find myself wondering about how they formed this opinion. Are they just writing the piece for the audience they want? Are they writing the piece based on their experience from months to years back, when these tools did seem to still be laughably bad? Are they simply cynically generating the piece using an LLM to bait for engagement? When I see this particular aspect of such a post it's a bit of a red flag about where they're coming from, kind of like how you suddenly realise that someone who seems to speak with authority might be full of shit when they start to spout questionable "facts" on a subject you understand well.

But wait! What about that list of dodgy stuff I've seen while building BlogMore with Copilot? What about all the reading and reviewing I've had to do, and what about the other crimes against Python coding I can probably still find in the codebase? Surely that is evidence that these tools produce terrible, unworkable, unusable code?

I mean, okay, I suppose I could reach that conclusion if I'd had a massively atypical experience in the software development industry and had never had to review anyone else's code, or had never needed to work on someone else's legacy code. Is what I'm seeing out of Copilot something I'd consider ideal code? Of course not. Is it worse than some of the worst code I've had to deal with since I started coding for a living in 1989? Hell no!

From what I'm seeing right now I'm getting code whose quality is... fine. Mostly it does the job fine. Often it needs a bit of coaxing in the right direction. Sometimes it gets totally confused and goes down a rabbit hole which needs to just be blocked off and we start again. Occasionally it needs rewriting to do the same thing but in a more maintainable way.

All of which sounds very familiar. I've had times where that describes my code (and I would massively distrust anyone who says they've never had the same outcomes in their time writing code). For sure it describes code I've had to take over, maintain or review.

It's almost like it was trained on lots of code written by humans.

Meanwhile... not every instance of using these tools to get code done needs to be about writing actual code. More and more I'm finding Google Gemini (for example) to be a really handy coding buddy and faster "Google this shit 'cos I can't remember this exact thing I want to achieve". I'll ask, I'll almost always get a pretty good answer, and then I can generally take that snippet of code and implement it how I want.

I've seldom had to walk away from that sort of interaction because it was getting me nowhere.

All of which is to say: I remain concerned about a great many things in the AI space at the moment, but I'm also as equally suspicious of someone who just flatly says "and the code it produces just doesn't work". If that's part of an article or post I'm left with the feeling that the author put zero actual effort into forming their opinion, let alone actually writing it.