I'm a software engineer, completing 10 years of professional experience this year. I started my career as a web frontend engineer (it was easier for me to de...
I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding here.
All of the qualities that make a codebase easier to read, maintain, and consume by humans do the same things for LLMs.
A codebase designed for humans is a codebase that is designed for LLMs. It’s just that most teams don’t even know how to design a codebase for humans. And those same teams just kind of accept LLM and Agent Slop as “Designed for LLMs”. When it most definitely is not.
Patternization
Structural consistency
Naming conventions
Style Opinionation
Organizational conventions
Safety and Quality Standards
…etc
All these things matter just as much for humans as they do for LLMs. And like I said previously, most human developers don’t understand these things and do not optimize for them anyways. Which means that most human developers are ill-equipped to create codebases that are not degrading rapidly under the use of agents.
This is a bit of a rant of mine… because I’ve spent the last decade learning how to optimize software engineering to best fit the needs of humans. Now that LLMs are crashing onto the scene, teams that already were writing slop by hand can now write slop at twenty times the rate. And then seem to think that all the things that make for good software no longer apply to them
Some of these are arguably much more important for LLMs because of limited context sizes. The more of the code in the context window follows good practice, the more likely the LLM is to align with it. Any nonsense in the context window will multiply and beat that one document with the style guide that the LLM might not even see.
I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding here.
All of the qualities that make a codebase easier to read, maintain, and consume by humans do the same things for LLMs.
A codebase designed for humans is a codebase that is designed for LLMs. It’s just that most teams don’t even know how to design a codebase for humans. And those same teams just kind of accept LLM and Agent Slop as “Designed for LLMs”. When it most definitely is not.
All these things matter just as much for humans as they do for LLMs. And like I said previously, most human developers don’t understand these things and do not optimize for them anyways. Which means that most human developers are ill-equipped to create codebases that are not degrading rapidly under the use of agents.
This is a bit of a rant of mine… because I’ve spent the last decade learning how to optimize software engineering to best fit the needs of humans. Now that LLMs are crashing onto the scene, teams that already were writing slop by hand can now write slop at twenty times the rate. And then seem to think that all the things that make for good software no longer apply to them
Some of these are arguably much more important for LLMs because of limited context sizes. The more of the code in the context window follows good practice, the more likely the LLM is to align with it. Any nonsense in the context window will multiply and beat that one document with the style guide that the LLM might not even see.