I wonder though if they just told agents to literally reverse engineer Photoshop. As in, they were given access to Photoshop and able to interact with the UI and figure out every minute behavior. With a good testing strategy, I could see agents producing a decent quality product. That’s basically strip mining years of effort put in by humans.

I’d love to see a language with structural types where functions are always unary and tuples don’t exist. Every function call would look like either f () (no args), f 1 (one arg) or f (foo: 1, bar: 2) (multiple args, names mandatory).

I started building a language like this but I haven’t worked on it in a while.

Agreed that the solution to metastasized slop debt is to just rewrite it. That’s kind of another way of saying that your entire codebase was written at prototype quality, except worse because of all the hidden decisions no one made.

I think the solution is a radical shift in how we test and review code. If your coworkers weren’t thorough at testing and code review before 2026, then you are probably suffering right now.

I’m guessing LLM advocates want to solve this problem by throwing more LLMs at it, I.e.adversarial review bots, harness engineering, etc. And those are probably good ideas to raise the competency of LLMs, but I don’t think they can replace the better judgement of humans anytime soon.

If your workplace culture already had strong testing and code review standards, then a sloppy PR is going to fail the smell test quickly.

And the biggest problem I see is simply with lazy people who don’t review their own slop but expect others to review it. It’s infuriating and completely unacceptable.

Assuming everyone is trying their best, there is really no substitute for getting your hands dirty and making sure you at least understand all of the code you submit and take the time to interrogate the surrounding code as well. I don’t think there is a hard rule to know that you’ve adequately “digested” and refined the LLM output. But even before LLMs, I used to review my own code and iterate to make it more readable. It’s like writing prose: you read, edit, re-read, until it’s good.

You don’t know the direct impact of this project on data center usage because you haven’t observed the development process. And you don’t know whether it infringes on copyright because you haven’t read the code.

How do you know it was built irresponsibly without reading the code, which is something you should be doing when adopting a dependency anyway?