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“LLMs will make codebases into unmaintainable slop!” Ed: “I just had built a ts-morph custom linter for free that enforces business rules the type system cannot. It required zero of my attention and is patterned to add more whenever needed”

Hot take: instead of making everything slop, LLMs will create a bimodal distribution in quality. On one side, codebases of an extremely high quality, previously impractical to attain. On the other, a level of code quality so low that we'll need to invent a new term for it. My money's on "hyperslop"

I buy this. But I think a lot of that is going to be transient. Like, yes it’ll exist—I don’t know how long it’ll be intended to last. Microsoft Access-style stuff. (Some will last forever and be a creeping horror, of course, but it won’t be intended to.)

The optimistic vision is that software engineers use LLMs to be more rigorous and develop robust tooling and techniques to allow people with little-to-no programming knowledge to build the things they want and need for themselves, even if the code is sloppy.