A client’s team spent a full week adding a CSV export to their admin panel. Two engineers, clear requirements, maybe a day of actual work. The rest of the time went to understanding existing code well enough to change it safely. That’s what I call codebase drag: when the codebase makes every task take longer than it should. It doesn’t show up in any dashboard or sprint report.
And LLM slop coding will make it exponentially worse.
My LLM slop personal projects have better test coverage than many many many professional projects I have had the “pleasure” of working with.
I’ve seen many an old crusty system with good test coverage. Doesn’t mean it’s good and high coverage doesn’t mean a good test suite. Coverage doesn’t measure quality of assertions being made.
Good coverage is still a lot better than no coverage when doing changes in a project you haven’t touched in ages
It’s like purposefully introducing tech debt into the code.
Yes and they’ll try to use more LLM slop coding to fix it, except it’ll cause the codebase to balloon way beyond any possible ability to contain it within a context window, so LLMs will hallucinate more slop and the whole edifice will come crashing down.
Yeah, but the LLM will eventually realize there’s no fixing it and delete everything. /s
Under capitalism there’s no lowest quality level at which workers can refuse to exchange their labor for pay.