Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code
An effect that’s being more and more widely reported is the increase in time it’s taking developers to modify or fix code that was generated by Large Language Models. If you’ve worked on legacy systems that were written by other people, perhaps decades ago, you’ll recognise this phenomenon. Before we can safely change code, we first need to understand it – understand what it does, and also oftentimes why it does it the way it does. In that sense, this is nothing new. What is new is the scale of the problem being created as lightning-speed code generators spew reams of unread code into millions of projects. Teams that care about quality will take the time to review and understand (and more often than not, rework) LLM-generated code before it makes it into the repo. This slows…
