LLMs and Almost Good Code

TL;DR: My new prior is that top-of-the-line LLMs working on easy tasks generate code that is maybe 10 % more complicated than necessary. I also think we accept this complexity too easily, because it comes from code that is right here, right now, solving an immediate problem. This may have consequences for maintenance in the long term.

The background to this discovery was that I needed to do some CRUD plumbing in a work project. It was a simple change that mostly mirrored existing functionality. This is a perfect fit for LLMs, in my experience, so I used a frontier model to generate the code for it. The change ended up being a total of just over 200 lines, mostly additions.

The part of the generated code we’ll talk about is a 24-line function that converts an arbitrary (user-supplied) string to a safe HTTP header value.

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