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Is generated code harder to maintain?

Volkmar Rigo on January 30, 2024

Code quality and maintainability I found an interesting article about code quality and maintainability of AI generated code. This is th...

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Ben Halpern • Jan 31 '24

I think: Most likely yes.

I've already been guilty of sneaking in a comment that didn't make sense because it was generated. This happens enough time and you lose the point of the code.

I don't think it's an all-or-nothing thing, but I suspect a lot of generated code is going to be on the low-readability spectrum.

Steffen H. Nielsen • Jan 31 '24

At my company, we are having big discussion on when to use generated code vs when not to, specifcly to test the maintainability.

We had to greate a custom data handler, that manipulates some Json data, stored in a SQL database, with basic CRUD operations.

I tried first to make the full implementation myself, and then using ChatGPT-4.

To then test the maintainability, one of my coworkers was tasked with updating the schema of the Json to support a new property. He then went and did this in both solutions.

The result was pretty clear. The generated code, was harder to alternate to support this new property, while the human created code was much easier.

To sum up, out findings:

Code structure was much different to what we normally do (naming, order of logic etc).
Generated code was faster to produce, but still required enough time to alter, that the time spent was almost the same at writing the code by human.
The generated code, was not able to utilize already existing methods and serives (to much duplicated code)

Our conclusion is therefore, that generated code is good for idea generation and getting some quick solutions, but it must never be fully copied.