I got the first prototype version of the code for the project I’m currently working on. It is an Arduino Sketch, that contains 1k lines, stores every single Value needed as a global Variable and every function reads and writes to these global variables, instead of taking them in as parameters. This code is so bad, that I refuse to even look at it. The effort to take the existing codebase and transform it into something useable is as high as rewriting it from scratch.
When telling my colleague that his code is absolute garbage, he just told me “its not my code, Claude did it”. I am constantly pushing towards implementing the project in a proper way, but it has been nothing but fights against people who don’t know how to code and who refuse to acknowledge that ignoring any standards of maintainable code does not turn out in the end and it makes sense to rewrite the project sooner than later.
I took an arduino class after already having programmed for years, and at one point the teacher wanted everyone to use chatgpt to write code for an assignment that was basically “run a motor while a button is pressed and stop it when it’s released”. The code for that is an extremely simple one liner, and if phrased correctly an llm could definitely spit out that single line, but everyone seemed to have it generate like 10+ line blocks with a bunch of if statements and stuff.