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Comment by equinumerous | Hacker News Reader

How do you avoid the spaghetti code that (in my experience) most AI models spit out? Sure you can steer it, ask it to make it better, etc... but it's easier to me to be in the driver's seat. Doesn't mean AI isn't useful, but whenever AI designs a feature end-to-end, everything is tightly-coupled, the wrong abstractions are picked, and fundamentally the code is not optimized for human understanding. I don't really understand how people can tolerate this kind of code (assuming they read it, which I think they do not). Just take the Claude Code CLI as an example - is there anyone in the world that knows how that spaghetti machine works?

I agree that AI is very useful in reviewing PRs and searching for bugs. It's definitely a game-changer there. But a human still needs to understand the code and take responsibility for it.

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>How do you avoid the spaghetti code

You don't. This is demonstrated by

>Claude Code CLI ... is there anyone in the world that knows how that spaghetti machine works

Having a very active, and happy user base.

Now this a simplistic view, and I think even heavily AI first dev teams still glance at the diff to make sure things aren't going too awry or ask questions. But the concept "spaghetti code" and "optimized for human understanding" are assumptions being revisited entirely in 2026.

I am not trying to get into a flame war, but I have seen a lot of complaints about Claude Code, not to mention their huge backlog of bug reports (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues) on GitHub. Just because they have lowered the bar for software quality and people have accepted it, does not mean that they are delivering quality software. I know at the very least we agree that these ideas are being re-explored in 2026, but I don't see evidence that it's a positive improvement for software development/quality. How many sites or services does one use on a daily basis that are just broken? Is that really the best our industry can aspire to?

EDIT: also, from the software engineer perspective, it is an order of magnitude more tedious to maintain software projects that lack quality, consistency, or standards. If I could measure the effect of AI vibe-coding in terms of personal pain, I would say it makes software development more painful when code is not well thought-out. There is a way to use AI responsibly, but I see more often people taking shortcuts and throwing "engineering" out the window. It's possible to ship quality with AI, but that's not the path of least resistance.

> but I have seen a lot of complaints about Claude Code,

This may be a case of "you'll see more posts from people who are complaining than from the people who are busy using it." As a semi-relevant comparison: go on Reddit/Twitter any time there's a Fortnite update and you'll see and endless sea of complaints, yet the game is still being played by ridiculous numbers of people.

It is difficult to get a man to complain about something when his job depends on him keeping quiet.

The kind of outfit that's going to go all in on Claude is also likely to punish "negativity about AI".

> How do you avoid the spaghetti code that (in my experience) most AI models spit out?

That's the neat thing—you don't.

Frontier models, especially Opus 5.5, have vastly stepped up their game in terms of code quality. Furthermore, the sheer volume and speed of code they produce has meant that humans just don't have time to read and review the code even if it were the most well-written code in the world. The frontier is now structuring your loops, graphs, and evals in such a way that agents with a fresh context review the agent-produced code looking for bugs and errors. If humans review anything, it's an agent-produced summary of the code changes.

Business people now expect speed of delivery that humans can't match. Humans are now the bottleneck; agents will step up to replace them.

I'm sorry, as someone that uses agents daily, I just don't buy it. When the whole thing collapses into a pile of junk, someone is on the hook, and customers are unhappy. I don't find this approach to engineering to be a sane way of going about things (and if I'm proven wrong, then I would expect the whole software engineering process to become fully automated and repeatable, which has not yet happened).

That's the brilliant part! Someone is on the hook but it's not going to be upper management. When it all goes tits up, you just fire your existing dev teams, hire in "AI-native" devs who better know how to work with these tools (i.e., kids fresh out of college who only graduated because Claude did all their homework) and try again! By the time this changeover occurs, the models will be able to handle most software engineering tasks on their own. (I know, it was "in six months" since three years ago. But it might actually happen this time; that step function over the summer ain't nuttin' to fuck wit' and Claude and Codex can now make sensible design/architecture decisions one-shotting a medium-sized component.)

It all starts making sense once you realize the most important thing in software development: MONEY. Oh, and the fact that management hates programmers.

You should see the spaghetti code that humans working 70 hour weeks for months on end to meet a launch date have pushed out.

You can be in the driver seat while delegating implementation to agents. You can use agents to generate documentation and refactor architectures. You can ask an agent to explain a feature and then work with it to plan how to extend it.

You don’t have to type the code to be the architect.

That's a fair point, now there's just much more spaghetti, faster. But agree overall.

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