Coding agents have been better than the average "enterprise" programmer for a while now and nobody wants to admit it or talk about it. I have never seen an agent output an implementation called FooImpl that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file, but I have seen plenty of human code like this.
People call coding agents bad because they don't know the asinine meaningless conventions at their particular company while they themselves write awful abstractions and brittle tightly coupled systems, but hey, at least they know how to write a for loop how their particular company likes.
> I have never seen an agent output an implementation called FooImpl that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file, but I have seen plenty of human code like this.
And how long does it take a coding agent to output a thousand lines of code versus a human? The worst human at any company was rate limited by themselves. Those 'average enterprise' programmers aren't going away, they're the ones now spending tens of thousands on coding agents and filling your codebase with even more garbage without bothering to review an iota of it.
Which is why one of the big problems for the field right now is that a) most code bases still need someone more skilled than a mere robot driver, and b) many developers are not better than that.
In the past, a team of five mid devs and one good one would be fine, because that good one would ride herd on the mid ones. But now those mid ones are slamming out robot code that they're incapable of meaningfully reviewing (because it's better than they are already), and they're just overwhelming the good dev's capacity.
The solution, of course, is to fire them all -- they're worthless now -- but this is not going to happen quickly, and it's probably for the best that it doesn't.
> And how long does it take a coding agent to output a thousand lines of code versus a human?
Sometimes the human is faster.
I've seen someone duplicate a class file (already filled with duplicate methods) rather than subclassing, and when called out on this it was because properties were private.
This was a team with just me and him in it, it didn't even really benefit from things being private.
That said, the really important lesson I've learned over the years is that terrible code and practices are almost irrelevant: this app won awards and was highly regarded.
Yesterday Claude wanted to add a position column to what is a slightly extended many-many relation table. It did this to "make ordering stable".
An average enterprise developer would never add bloat like that up-front, unless if the ability to change the order was a requirement.
Obviously a stable order can be easily derived from the ID or a creation time (if available).
Setting a position however requires extra steps to ensure the integrity of the sequence.
I see things like that all the time, and it's always stuff that grows the code base and adds unnecessary complexity.
> I have never seen an agent output an implementation called FooImpl that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file, but I have seen plenty of human code like this.
I've seen countless vibecoded implementations that look exactly like that. Especially painful is agents adding the same utility functions in each and every file instead of properly reusing or splitting things.
And then I have to fix them.
no
i've never seen even a junior do something as crazy as displaying a page sheet ui from literally a color object, yes, a literal color...
> that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file
Why is this worse than splitting it across 1k files?
Does taking this example and extending it to the limit answer your question? There is a reason we don’t have a single file called program with a million lines of code in it. Google studies on module size vs code defect rates for more empirical numbers.
The limit you're replying to is files which are each tens of lines long. At that point, the cognitive overhead of switching documents is larger than the benefit of a compact object to reason about.
(Personally my threshold is around 2-5 thousand lines per file depending on what it is; but that's me working solo, obviously I'll follow whatever standards any team I'm in gives me).