Does Code Cleanliness Affect Coding Agents?(arxiv.org) |
Does Code Cleanliness Affect Coding Agents?(arxiv.org) |
You can get the LLM to run a script which checks for all of these and also enforce them by running the same script as a pre-commit hook. Setting this up religiously in every code base I work on has been what's given me the most mileage with agentic coding.
I wrote down a more detailed post of the various linters I use here:
https://www.balajeerc.info/Use-Deterministic-Guardrails-for-...
The most useful discussion would be if we all read the paper and critique its methodology or results.
though people who complain that llms aren't that great strike me as the type to have messy code bases
So I personally at a minimum will want to talk “in code” about what code does.
This feels like a terrible approach, sufficient to condemn the entire study.
Apparently half of the "minimal pairs" in this work were constructed in this way. I simply am not going to trust any conclusion that requires assuming these AI "cleaned" repos are in any way representative of actually-good codebases.
With coding agents, agents can produce code quicker. The same trade-off still applies.. but, the time it takes an LLM coding agent to write well organised code is still going to be quicker than the time it takes me to write scrappy code.
You take on a lot of tech debt. Then you need to do the same work you would do with any legacy app: finding where the brittle points are, what needs better testing, which leads to breaking apart the big ball of mud into cleaner components.