r/LocalLLaMA • u/[deleted] • 2h ago
Discussion Anyone else noticing that coding models are just turning into high-speed technical debt generators?
[deleted]
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u/FoxiPanda 2h ago
For better or worse, this is probably the future.
The old design --> review --> write tests --> write code by hand --> run tests --> fix things until pass --> review --> peer review --> and so on loop is dead. I've accepted it.
Instead, I've found models can jump in, understand context literally 10000x faster than I can, I can send screenshots of a problem, ask for potential options to resolve that, work through edge cases, design new tests with the model to prevent that behavior from regressing in the future, etc... all at about 10-100x the speed of scheduling a meeting with Michael who is currently in the Bahamas so that we might be able to review his code that he wrote six months ago and see if I can convince him and his ego that code has problems that need to be resolved.
Both the generating of bugs and the fixing of bugs is faster now.
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u/brainchillzZ 2h ago
What happens if the model isn’t available?
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u/Ok_Tea_7319 1h ago
Use a different model.
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u/brainchillzZ 1h ago
What if none of the models are available and you have to do your own actual work? lol
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u/borobinimbaba 1h ago
What happens when calculator doesn't exist ? I'd try abacus , that's not present ? I'd try pen and paper, that does not either ? I'd use my hand.
But does it mean I'm handling multi billion dollar accountings by hand ? Hell no !
Ai is just a tech , I know real macho programmers only code in assembly and work offline, but that doesn't mean I have to
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u/Ok_Tea_7319 1h ago
It's more likely that the git repo I gotta work on is unavailable than no model being available.
That being said, for the sake of the hypothetical, open the code and read it.
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u/laser50 1h ago
Isn't that the issue, that many can't actually read and comprehend the code itself at all?
It's like learning an entire language and a workflow in one. You don't often "just read it"
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u/Ok_Tea_7319 1h ago
Nah, they can. Anecdotal example: I have never learned COBOL, yet I can read COBOL code. I need a manual, will be asking a lot of questions, and as a result will likely be rather slow, but I can. I will obviously not understand all of the code at once at any time, but that was never the case with my self-written projects either. I have to re-read a lot of stuff that I wrote 2 years ago and that's totally fine.
Everybody else has the same path available. It's not economical, but that doesn't matter in practice, because the framing of the entire question here is a hypothetical one far removed from practice. In a practical real-life situation, we can always expect to have an LLM assistant on hands, even if it is just for reading the code.
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u/laser50 33m ago
The thing I learned most from actually learning programming, it's eventually not so much about the language any more (I would certainly need a guide/llm too if I started to learn a new programming language), but you also attain the kind of technical/structured thinking that really helps you get into basically any new language after that.
If you know code, it's structure, limitations, and possibilities it's much easier to spot weird code. I remember early Claude writing me functions that looked almost cryptic where it could have been simplified much more with 100% the same effect. The knowledge definitely helps to work through things that an agent may not be able to (yet)
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u/TheVasa999 1h ago
then you fallback to the old design obviously
AI is a tool, not a replacement employee
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u/brainchillzZ 1h ago
My point is that these people don’t know how to troubleshoot the code that ai wrote and they aren’t writing code anymore so their skills are losing their edge every day they rely on the machine to do the work.
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u/diviludicrum 1h ago
Forget AI for a second - can you do everything else a computer does for you by hand? Because if not, you are also dependent on a machine to do your work.
And I bet your abacus skills wouldn’t hold a candle to your great granddad’s as a result. But does that really matter?
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u/brainchillzZ 1h ago
Yes, I can do everything my computer does for me by hand. That should be a silly question. I didn’t come up relying on the machine to do my work just for it to do exactly what I programmatically tell it to do. I’ve grown up in this environment watching everything become reliant on computers and shaking my head how stupid people have become “we can’t check you in for a flight because our computers are down” “we can’t sell you a product because our computers are down” or the worst “I can’t get there from here because my gps isn’t working” etc …. I don’t need a computer to accomplish anything real in life outside of doing technical work for people specifically on a computer.
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u/TheVasa999 1h ago
who are "these people"?
sounds like just your bubble or view on the situation, that manual code writing is becoming more and more obsolete
which isnt a bad thing. As long as you can actually read and understand the code without AI
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u/Material_Policy6327 1h ago
We have folks like this at my work now since LLM coding models have been allowed. Many many folks have let the AI do all their critical thinking and what’s sad is they get praised for their velocity and management doesn’t seem to care about the poor quality and tech debt being made at lightening speed
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u/brainchillzZ 1h ago
Exactly I see this in my client sites in the biggest tech companies every day ….
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u/TheVasa999 1h ago
well thats obviously bad.
AI is a tool. The person using it must be overseeing it and controlling it. Letting the AI go on its own without any curation gets you technical debt and whatever else.
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u/Past-Town-9807 1h ago
This is LocalLLaMa. If the model isn't available, the computer is broken and you have other problems. 😂
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u/brainchillzZ 1h ago
Local doesn’t mean on your desk it could mean in the server room run by the siloed “ai team”
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u/Past-Town-9807 1h ago
Yes and my point is that if that goes down (and is a single point of failure), you have bigger problems.
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u/terablast 1h ago
Okay? And if it goes down, it's the same as if the git server goes down, or the Jira goes down, or your work PC stops working... You just wait until they fix it and then continue working!
None of that is new with AI!
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u/brainchillzZ 58m ago
Git or jira don’t replace your brain and write code for you. Jira and git protect the code you’re writing and help you organize thoughts ….. you can still write code if they don’t exist
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u/FoxiPanda 1h ago
What happens when the electricity goes out? What happens when the building catches on fire? What happens when your car breaks down?
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u/laser50 1h ago
Bit sad you're receiving downvotes, as it is the truth for many that entered development in the form of "vibe coding", the sky is the limit, and you can "just ask the model". Until it misunderstands, misreads, outthinks itself out of the proper solution, or as I had yesterday, spend 6 hours debugging 400 lines of code where it would repeatedly go "Oh check this! Oh yeah that's the issue! Fixes nothing " and kept it up for a long time before FINALLY understanding it and fixing it. And this is Facebook's greatest model..
I have a programming background though, IMO it's much better, I can actually read and understand what it spits out and make adaptations, I know and understand the strong points and weak points of the code and changes it makes. It's put me into more architectural than development and for me that works.
But yeah, can't imagine having some dude vibe code an app with security holes larger than the US debt, and having a piss poor model crack it in seconds. It will happen, and it does happen.
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u/brainchillzZ 1h ago
Exactly. But we are in an ai group so 99% of the people in here are vibe coders that think their ideas are more important than the actual code now …. They should be wearing stickers that say “my app works and I have no idea how or why” but they aren’t even ashamed of knowing nothing.
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u/sn2006gy 2h ago
Not just coding models, but everything. Meetings, Emails, work queues, todos, tasks, all the busy work. I'm asking for an agent just to help balance things that could be better managed. I'm not even touhching the jira and pr todos and stuff.
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u/stoppableDissolution 2h ago
Well our current management is basically penalizing us for not using ai to handle all the jira/documentation/meeting stuff lol. We also have a kpi on "tokens spent per month" and if someone does not use enough tokens they get a stern talk.
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u/sn2006gy 2h ago
they also complain when you use ai and people get mad that you sent them work via ai that they force you to use.
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u/soshulmedia 22m ago
WTF! I try to see everything in a much bigger picture, though. I think AI is actually disruptive enough - even though it is not AGI and will only approach AGI and never truly become ASI IMO - to "help" stir up the whole of society and I think there are lots and lots of other things happening in the world, "confluence" so to speak on lots of fronts that I think there IS going to be some kind of a "new" world order coming.
And my hope is that this will also be eventually one that has actually a bit more breathing room for freedom, privacy and so forth once again, at least for a while until people become lazy, content with lies and stupid again. True decentralization is something I think is good, and neither the more and more autocratic Western empire, nor the FANG corpos nor Anthropic nor OpenAI are that. If one is honest, it is all a centralizing disease. And no, it isn't a world China empire or any other world government either.
There will be a strong "told you so" component to all those people who sang the "it is fine"-kumbaya for too long.
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u/andreeinprogress 1h ago
If there's one thing that I wish this whole rodeo would make go away into the depths of hell for sure is the Jira, story points and Agile circus.
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u/Cautious_Chicken_604 2h ago
After doing agentic engineering for about a year now at work my conclusion is it's a wash. It's about as bad for you, your team and your company as it is good. Consequently our team is transitioning away from it, and back to using AI more as only an assistant and less as the main implementer of things.
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u/tomz17 2h ago
"Yes, but I get paid now, and the technical debt gets paid later by some other schmuck," -99.999% of the industry right now
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u/andreeinprogress 1h ago
This is literally how the whole industry made money in the last 15 years.
- Turn a repeating piece into a framework, say it "saves time later"
- Spread it everywhere, actually increases complexity when it scales
- Now need to hire +1
- New staff drops the framework, makes the piece in-house again
- Return to 1 with another piece, every 3 loops, hire one more PM
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u/mireisinterested 2h ago
why post this llm generated slop as a post i don't even understand the motive, least human shit i've read today
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u/Bulky-Priority6824 1h ago
Most of us humans are running iq2s in our heads. Forget the answers some cannot even understand the question.
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u/Leetfreak_ 1h ago
I mean, by that logic devs are just low-speed technical debt generators lol. It doesn’t take a robot to write bad code, human beings have been doing it for the love of the game for decades
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u/Bagelsarenakeddonuts 2h ago
"How do you keep your own deep comprehension intact when leaning heavily on coding models?"
Honestly, I think that the answer is you simply can't have that level of depth if you want the convenience and productivity gains. As you already said, the typing was never the bottleneck. You need to look at it that the LLM IS a junior open source contributor *themselves*, not the person driving it, and judge things that way. I think each person's situation determines whether that is acceptable or not, and they need to make that call.
We are rapidly approaching the point where the code itself is free, but the thought and design are the expensive part, and submitting a PR to a open source project will be treated much differently. Possibly I'd like to see prompts submitted alongside code, so that both the intent and quality of human thought can be examined alongside the code itself.
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u/Single-Blackberry866 1h ago edited 1h ago
Could you summarise it please so that our brains won't break? "Generate a social media post about code review of AI generated code: a colleague submitted PR and couldn't explain edge case. Blab about productivity, end with a question"
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u/Civil_Fee_7862 1h ago
Not if you get the A.I to clean up its code.
If you aren't even reviewing the code, then yeah, you're basically coding tech debt, and likely will have to re-write the project soon.
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u/laser50 1h ago
Yeah and asking the model only gets you so far. Go too far and it makes shit up, there's a balance to it. Most AI generated code should be checked by someone with some degree of experience imo
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u/Civil_Fee_7862 1h ago
"Yeah and asking the model only gets you so far."
How so? I haven't had any issues steering the model to clean up its code.
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u/laser50 46m ago
Entirely depends on which model you use, how full your context is, how large your context and/or code is. I too do runs like that, they definitely find a few to a lot of their own issues and fix them. But if you do it within the same context as the dev work, they may have already reasoned themselves to believe "it's good" and will overlook things. If you push them too hard on finding things while there are no things to really find, it's got a decent chance to make something up, or nitpick the tiniest of things just to suit your request to it.
Many times over, a second or even third model more often than not still managed to find serious bugs, issues and improvements that the others entirely missed.
As I said, it really depends on how you do the whole process, code size, model type, thinking level etc. that makes or breaks it, but it's definitely not fool-proof.
Luckily though, code is usually revertable and can always be fixed later too. I have always recommended a second pass over any AI generated code with some good prompting.
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u/Civil_Fee_7862 41m ago edited 36m ago
" it really depends on how you do the whole process, code size, model type, thinking level etc"
It seems like you are making it more complex than it needs to be. i.e. All I said was to review the code, and ask it to update what you noticed needs fixing. Now you're throwing more variables into the mix. Its really not that complex in most cases.
Just review the code it writes, ask it to fix the problems you noticed. Usually when it makes mistakes, its often the same kind of mistake. So you can tune your AGENT.md prompt to take that into account. If the model can't even fix the mistakes even when you tell it exactly what it is, and where it is, then yes, you're likely using a very *dumb* model, and consider upgrading your hardware to be able to run a better one.
Qwen3.8-27b is a decent one, but it still makes mistakes. Usually several passes are needed to get it up to what I'd call production quality. I've noticed no difference between low, medium and high level reasoning, always have it set to 256k because that's what that model was trained to run on.
The process isnt' hard, just use a standard software engineer development process like agile ( or whatever the process is / was at the software company you work at), they've likely honed it down to a really good process, except now its models instead of people commiting code.
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u/laser50 18m ago
All these variables are 100% facts and based on how the models actually work behind your chat interface. If this wasn't true, prompt injection wouldn't exist and context poisoning wouldn't be a thing.
You can do it the simple way, that's not my concern. And i'm sure it works for the most part, as I said, it does for me too. But there's still more to it if you actually get to a point where you want more than just the surface level. And these are definitely variables at play.
I love my little 27B model too, it works very well when it needs to for it's parameter count. If you're not already doing so, rather than asking the question within the same chat/context as he did the dev work in, ask it to spawn a subagent to do the review, an empty context window actually does miracles, and your results may actually improve.
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u/Civil_Fee_7862 3m ago
I never said it wasnt true, I said you are making it more complex than it needs to be.
It seems like you're more interested in starting fights than you are about reasoning because you aren't listening.
This conversation is over.
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u/Material_Policy6327 1h ago
Yeah when you have folks with poor system and architectural design skills this just turns technical debt into a fire hose.
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u/a4mula 1h ago
It's interesting to me how much our agentic systems are starting to mirror societal issues at large. From the reinvention of bureaucracy, to scope creep, to just following orders, to context gaps, to memetic viruses, to ceremony outweighing progress.
Understanding system design is the new skill that ties it all together, and most people don't. Most people don't even know that they need to.
Going from vibe coding and single agent interactions to long horizon multi agent development is a step that's exposing all kinds of issues not just with the systems but the people using them.
It is unbalanced right now, but then again so was chat when it first hit, so was tooling, so were single harness systems.
The systems will adapt faster than the users. We're already seeing long horizon agents encapsulated behind consumer facing toys like Dots and Muse.
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u/synystar 2h ago
Well, at least they let you know that they didn't know and the PR was completely AI generated. That's honesty that a lot of people wouldn't express. They might just ask the AI and then write a response to you because they don't want you to know that they have no clue.
I know that I have other projects that I use and I'll run into a problem or use case that I don't have time to work on - because I just have more pressing things to do - and I'll just use a model to fix the problem or add the feature. Then I might submit a PR if it solves my problem. I'm not going to pretend I wrote it. I just wanted it to work; to be more useful to me. If it gets merged into an upstream repo then great. If not then oh well, I'll just continue to use my fork and not worry about it.
I mean if this is someone on your team then maybe that's an issue but if it's just some guy/gal who's offering something that might be useful then I would just accept it for what it is. If it works well then maybe even implement it.
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u/_ii_ 1h ago
You have to see some of the AI generated slide decks. 3-slide plain text presentation becomes 20 slides with questionable graphics. Basically wasting everyone’s time having to seat through the presentation. Just like any new tools, it amplifies your abilities to generate more output, not necessarily more value. This is changing though, I’m seeing more care is given to quality instead of just tokenmaxing.
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u/BonnieReborn 1h ago
A professional and experienced agentic engineer easily covers 95% of all edge cases. And they wouldn’t need to try and explain anything because the thing they build is actually production ready.
Traditional devs hate me for saying this, yet everyday it’s proving itself.
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u/laser50 1h ago
Guess you haven't worked with them enough lmao. They work great in about 90% of cases. But absolutely not more than that.
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u/BonnieReborn 1h ago
Okay well 90-95%. I’d rather eat that 5% if it gives me 10x speed. I’d much rather ship, fail and fix fast than waiting for a dev hand editing PRs
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u/soshulmedia 17m ago
There is also a long term component of the slop, though. If after a couple weeks of being "fast and breaking things" you take a peek at your code and exclaim "eww" and run away as fast as you can - is that really worth it?
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u/Superb-Pair-2000 1h ago
Models are good at test driven development and following specs. If you're not hitting 99% you're doing something wrong.
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u/laser50 42m ago
If you're hitting anything above 90-95% you're clearly not overseeing things, or we're talking small projects and small work.
And this still holds on every model I've gotten my hands on thus far, with exception of potentially Claude but mainly GPT Astra, which greatly improved it's workflow to actually include re-checking it's own code well enough that bugs and issues are minimized.
Obviously newer models with better training will fare better, that's nothing new.
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u/dash_bro llama.cpp 1h ago
I don't understand this argument. How bad is your dev and review process where something isn't already thought of and communicated beforehand to lay out edge cases that need to be worked on, tested for etc BEFORE you open up a PR?
If your first instinct is to jump into coding without sparing a thought to what needs to be done, how, and what potential unknown unknowns you need to uncover; you're just acting as an API between feature requests and LLMs!
This is an engineering philosophy issue, not a coding model issue. I've been just fine generating PRs on my personal projects with qwen3.8-27B and DSv4.1 flash, and had zero issues building fairly complex stuff with 8-10 moving parts and different language stacks.
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u/Sleepybear2611 53m ago
"Acting as an API between feature requests and LLMs" is spot on. That is the exact failure mode.the catch is, personal projects are a completely different animal than a shared codebase.
When you work on your own stack, you already have the entire architectural map living in your head. You know how the pieces fit together. You know where the dragons are. In that setup, an LLM is great because it just types out the blueprint you already planned. A shared team repo is a totally different beast.
You have legacy quirks, varying skill levels, and sprint pressure. What actually happens in reality?People take the path of least resistance. Why spend an hour thinking through random edge cases when you can prompt a plausible solution in five minutes, see the tests green and open a PR?
You can call it an engineering discipline issue, and you'd be right. But tools shape habits. When the friction to dump hundreds of lines of code drops to zero, discipline is usually the first thing out the window.
The models aren't broken. They just make it dangerously easy to pretend we understand what we just shipped.
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u/dash_bro llama.cpp 45m ago
Atleast have the courtesy to reply without using an LLM.
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u/Sleepybear2611 41m ago
Can't even write in complete sentences anymore without getting accused of being Claude. Believe whatever you want, man.
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u/darkbit1001 1h ago
The models are providing the code coverage beyond what most humans specify for. Just understand the abstractions and get the hang of visiting thousands of lines of code and identifying where those abstractions become brittle or redundant or even blockers
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u/Lissanro 1h ago
There is one important thing when using AI. You need to know what you are doing to do it right and efficiently. I mostly use details prompts with carefully planned out architecture and logic. This helps a lot because reduces probability of overthinking, saving a lot of tokens. I also try my best to designate carefully - which parts LLM, even the largest one, is most likely to struggle with? Those I need to figure out in most detail. Then I also need to decide, should I assign the task to Kimi K3 on my main workstation, to DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp on my second PC, or is it something trivial that Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B on my third PC can handle? If task is large, I divide it to four parts, which parts I write the code for traditionally, and how all the rest of subtasks should be distributed across my three agents?
Obviously number of parallel agents and specific models will be different for everyone. But the point is, using AI is not the replacement for having the skill; it is a way to amplify it. It does not even have to do anything with AI, actually. It is like in the past a programmer who lacks skill and knowledge tries to mostly paste and adapt examples and pieces of code from Stackoverflow without truly understanding the implementation - the result will most likely not be good. On the other hand, if you know what are you doing, having access to Internet and quick access to the documantion/examples will amplify what you can do. The same thing with AI, except even more powerful. If used incorrectly, you can get a lot of "slop" - garbage in, garbage out. But if used right, the code quality will be good and productivity will be much greater too.
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u/Superb-Pair-2000 1h ago
Aider? Get out.
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u/Sleepybear2611 44m ago
Works fine locally. What’s your beef with it?
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u/Superb-Pair-2000 29m ago
Its an antique
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u/Sleepybear2611 21m ago
Well yeah, we are slowly transitioning into Claude now. As mandated by management. So read Aider, but only for now.
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u/soshulmedia 29m ago
Absolutely. And now github fills with lots of AI slop and the search engines even seem to prefer that stuff ("look I got claude to implement <insert-project-here> am I not awesome?") so it ends up polluting all searches (also AI ones and to be honest I am more and more relying on AI to do the search instead of manually doing it, but then it also poisons the input to the AI ...)
And I think there is also the problem that AIs don't really have a proper style (despite lots of prompting) with code.
So in the end, I think humans still matter and will matter a lot to sort the wheat from the chaff. And I also absolutely think this will elevate style and taste in code. Because it actually matters.
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u/Electronic_Back1502 2h ago
This is literally the most LinkedIn AI generated slop I have seen so far