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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

> I did not much more than a cursory glance too, but found "./sandbox/create.go", a ~1300 lines long file with so much duplication even within just itself that I stopped counting.

Really? What duplication did you actually find? I count a few small ones in buildMounts and ReadPrompt, maybe 20 lines or so, but hardly anything worthy of such an epithet.

Admittedly, the parsing & escaping code and some utility functions could be moved outside to shrink the file, but otherwise I'm having trouble finding issues with the code.

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The duplication I'm seeing isn't just "same text repeated" but structural duplication. Doing a quick 5 minute look again just to give you some pointers; runtime.MountSpec construction in buildMounts, Workdir vs aux-dir mount-mode handling, repeated one-off mount append blocks, overlay detection and so on, the list goes on. Just those should account for 200+ lines.

Look for slight variations of the same thing but with different paths, variables, or modes and I think you'd be able to spot the rest as well.

You consider adding in-place constructed items to an array to be code duplication?

I've noticed that the bar for "quality" when people judge AI is often significantly higher than what they'd hold a human to. I'm not saying GP et al are doing this (I haven't looked myself), but it is a widespread pattern I've noticed both professionally and personally. I don't know why it is.

I have seen it too. The answer is easy - they don’t like AI. I've seen similar things with some people that don’t like women in tech or certain minorities - they suddenly critique at an extremely high level. I also haven’t looked at this particular case, but it wouldn’t surprise me to be the same thing here.

Dude, are you for real? We've had the supposed inevitability of AI rammed down our throats since the minute LaMDA convinced Blake Lemoine it was sentient, we've watched CEOs hype up AI as if it were production-ready while it was still barely beta quality, LLM-driven chatbots have been stapled to the side of every product no matter how little sense it makes since OpenAI published an API, and we've been told to prepare for the inevitable "agentic future" even as Claude 3.5 had to have its hand held more than a wet-behind-the-ears freshman summer intern. We're told that this technology is going to eat the entire world economy and render human labor obsolete, starting with our jobs, but if it's genuinely supposed to do that, I think it's more than reasonable to expect it to write superhumanly perfect code, not just code that's incrementally better than the last model release but still bad; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, after all. To liken AI skepticism to the obstacles faced by women and minorities in tech is a category error that trivializes actual human struggles against human prejudices.

> I also haven’t looked at this particular case, but it wouldn’t surprise me to be the same thing here.

Be surprised then, because me, who left the critique, probably exclusively programmed with agents for the last year or so, so unlikely I think the code is bad because I "don't like AI". I don't love it either, but wouldn't call myself a AI-hater by any measurements, would be weird to write articles like this if so: https://emsh.cat/en/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/

Again, I wasn't reacting specifically to you (as noted, I wouldn't be surprised if so, but I also wouldn't be surprised if not). I was making a more general statement.

The bar isn't any higher. There's just no grace given. No one is judging a hobby project made by a human on quality, and the person who the hobby project belongs to will rarely say that their code is high quality. And in a professional setting, I think people are fine with "good enough" but they're not going to claim anything is high-quality.

But people are so quick to label their vibe-coded codebase as high quality and no grace is going to be given to a machine.

What comments are you seeing that are calling code from humans high-quality?

Grace shouldn't be given though. The code from vibe coding should pass the review bar as-is. If you need to iterate, you've defeated the purpose.

Because the end result is people committing bad code. For some random hobby project, sure who cares. But people are using this at work. The codebase is rotting in a new innovative way.

Either the bar has to be set at "actually good code comes out of vibe coding" or you have to accept that codebases are going to steadily become less usable by human coders who use their fingers to type in emacs.

Suddenly every dev needs an agent to even work with the slop. Seems like an outcome Anthropic would love though....

People who use AI set the bar themselves when they claim they generate "very high quality work using Claude". Humans more rarely make such claims about the code they write themselves, but when they do, I expect they face similar scrutiny.

AI code is competent, but it's not great or high quality unless you have a good enough eye for quality to steer it with an iron hand. But if you do, you know the quality comes from proper guidance, so you still wouldn't say AI code is great. If you do say exactly that, it comes across as having low standards (which is fine if you own it) and people are going to jump on that just to bring you down a peg.

> "I've noticed that the bar for 'quality' when people judge AI is often significantly higher than what they'd hold a human to."

Because that is literally the hype being fed to us by the marketers at the AI companies and HN users promoting AI.

- AI promoters: "AI is doing Ph.D level work! LLMs are not just a token predictor, it is actually thinking and reasoning! It will replace all developers, including _you_, so get on board the AI hype train now!"

- AI promoters when confronted with blatant mistakes and reasoning errors from cutting edge models: "Why are you holding LLMs up to higher standards than humans? That's not fair or reasonable."

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