I’ve been working on a bottom-to-top rewrite of an app that’s been shipping for the last couple of years. The initial version took over two years to write.
It’s coming along great. I’ve only been working on it since February, and it’s very complete, functionally. I’ve been using an LLM, extensively.
The original server took over seven months to write, but with the LLM, I had it done in about a month. The PHP code is great quality.
It’s not all bunnies and flowers, though. I’m spending the next few days, rewriting a Swift viewcontroller that the LLM wrote. It works, but the code is awful. It looks like it was written by a jargon-addled high schooler on Adderall. I just can’t bear to have that level of junk in my app. I asked it to refactor the code to improve the quality, and reduce the size, and it removed all the documentation and logging; leaving the thread- and delay-riddled garbage behind.
If someone that worked for me had done that, I would have evicted them, with a trebuchet.
I realized that I can't count on the LLM to help me maintain its mess, so I'd better just suck it up, and do it myself.
The good news is, is that I’m so far ahead of schedule (a position that I’ve never been in, in forty years of development), that I can afford to do this.