Magically? No. There’s nothing magical that we have and models don’t. But if you’re pretending using LLMs to write code does not correlate with a certain level of disregard to the quality of the resulting software, then you are either lying to yourself or us. And apart from that, while I think the only really special thing humans have over LLMs is way richer input modalities, the models also don’t have any good form of long term memory and learning (INB4: note that I said “good”, I doubt anything you’ll try to counter this with qualifies), so they will keep making the same mistakes over and over when the context expires. We, at least, have the theoretical capacity to learn from our mistakes (even if we often don’t).
And yes, I have only anecdata on me, not hard publication receipts, but I can tell what effect this had on someone who never hated the models (Stanford’s Junior powersliding in a reverse sweep into a parking spot will never not be cool), but always hated the then-baseless hype, thought SWE agents started being useful at all maybe last June or something and only started using it a lot with Opus 4.6, because I might as well get some side projects done before it eats my job as well.
And that effect is, that I do care less. This is a complex effect, because I’m broken in a complex way — another facet, is that I actually stopped feeling like an useless piece of shit wanting to die, because I could overpower my executive dysfunction leveraging Claudius Opposum 4.6 — but I can at the very least tell that.
I have still never released any code I haven’t thoroughly turned upside down to understand it and structure it the way I like. Hopefully never will, would make current me be very disappointed in the future me. But my personal projects basically run themselves (don’t judge, using this as an executive dysfunction therapeutical crutch) and I don’t care that much about the code - between it being written in Rust, built with Nix, heavily tested (including NixOS VM tests enhanced with “computer use" for things like “if I add a bookmark in Firefox on one computer, will it sync to another computer going through ma Firefox Account re-implementation?”) and, like, just working as advertised, such “slopengineering” is good enough for throwaway/personal stuff. If lives depended on it, I would review thoroughly, but they don’t (and in a perverse way, one may be contingent on not having to look at it, actually).
And honestly, I think most people are less autistic than me. They’re just gonna slop it out, publish and not care. It’s not about moralising, it’s about not painting a bigger supply chain attack target on us than necessary, and a default off config option sounds reasonable here.
Now, it’s a good question on how to reliably check whether software is (unacceptably) slopped, but that’s orthogonal to whether it’s desirable and I would argue it is. For me the point of models is I can slop something for myself if I need to and can’t find it in me to do this, not perpetuate the Dead Internet Theory even further.