> If you are going to compare the bottom of the pile of synthetic code, you should do the same with organic code of back then lest you draw an unfair comparison.
Make it the bottom 70% AI vs. the bottom 10% human if you want to. You're still going to be well within a sea of AI-slop because the volume is that large. The big thing about bad human code is that it tends to still be compact; I can read in some minutes the intention and what does(n't) work.
For each vibe-coded project I gotta do a tiny expedition just to get the basic idea of what's going on. let alone figuring out if things actually work as intended.
> The big thing about bad human code is that it tends to still be compact
I envy the environment you've worked before, because you definitely had a better experience than mine. My first job was working on a product -- not a prototype you see, an actual product with paying customers generating over 100k USD monthly for the company -- that was completely designed by interns from the ground up. Once we received a pull request on a part of the system that dealt with calculation reports that made snapshots of the relational db into MongoDB. This application was in PHP using an outdated CakePHP framework -- which was outdated for a good reason since it used to introduce breaking changes in minor releases (citation needed, but who's got the time these days...) -- and the merge request that once-employee left us to figure out how to merge was a single 400 lines function. You can extrapolate from it to infer the quality of the snapshots we were taking and you probably wouldn't land too far from the horrors we've seen.
So pardon me, but my experience shocks violently with your affirmation.I think you underestimate what the bottom 10% really is.
Make it the bottom 70% AI vs. the bottom 10% human if you want to. You're still going to be well within a sea of AI-slop because the volume is that large. The big thing about bad human code is that it tends to still be compact; I can read in some minutes the intention and what does(n't) work.
For each vibe-coded project I gotta do a tiny expedition just to get the basic idea of what's going on. let alone figuring out if things actually work as intended.