The code is quite terrible, but no one has ever cared about code quality, at least in my experience. All they’ve ever cared about is that “it works”. It’s why an army of juniors always write most of the code.
I had this same discussion at work the other day. I had an 80k line generated project dropped on my plate. It doesn’t use anything built into the web framework or orm. It’s a maintenance nightmare.
I think there are plenty of projects where "good enough" really is "good enough"...maybe most apps? If you're just making a shitty simple app, I don't really care about code quality.
Example: I got Claude to generate a language server for TLA+ so I could have nice integration with Neovim. It took like 45 minutes of arguing with Claude and then it worked fine. This is incredibly low-stakes stuff: realistically the worst case scenario is that the text in the file gets screwed up, and I'm somewhat protected by Git if that happens.
That said, I am a little concerned how cavalier people have been deploying AI code everywhere. I don't want pacemaker firmware to be written by some intern in an afternoon with Claude.
Yes I agree, the low stake, low evolution code is perfect for LLMs. The project I was handed is not that at all.
Maybe you can ask Claude to reverse engineer what the original prompt was.