As someone who interacted a bit with the codebase of Swirl.jl a bit I’d like to share a bit of my personal experience.
First, as with most topics in life: it’s not all black and white. Not all generated code is bad, not all uses of this technique are worthwhile either.
To the case at hand: I think we can agree that the generated codebase is different from one that would be developed without. It is more verbose and has lots of hardcoded repetition and lacks abtractions that one typically finds in human generated code. And to me as a developer that makes it unpleasant to work with. Up to a point where I think you can’t efficiently work with the code without using some kind of code assistant and hence I made more issues than PRs since I don’t use them at the moment.
However, this simpler code structure might very well make it easier for people who have less experience in coding (like my students) to work with the codebase and maybe its also a structure that LLMs can handle better, I don’t know.
So would I prefer a human generated codebase? Sure.
But also its an easy to underestimate amount of work to develop a project like this. And then if you don’t do it and I don’t do it a machine generated codebase that does the thing is better than the ideal codebase that nobody writes.
And as with every other open source project the code will improve over time no matter how it started.
In the end I am not completely sold on that the amount of work to turn an machine generated codebase into one that is fun to work with is much less than writing it from scratch, but I think everyone has its own workflow.
TLDR: I don’t like it, I don’t hate it. IMO this package is one of the better uses of coding agents that I have seen.
P.S.: The thing I dislike about the current AI hype the most is that its hard to have a genuine conversation because most people seem to either be on the “humans will be superfluous soon” train or the “kill it with fire” train and it is hard to talk about actual gains and losses, without people shouting at each other.