Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

All of it smells of a (lousy) junior software engineer: from configuring root logger at the top, module level (which relies on module import caching not to be reapplied), over not using a stdlib config file parser and building one themselves, to a raciness in load_json where it's checked for file existence with an if and then carrying on as if the file is certainly there...

In a nutshell, if the rest of it is like this, it simply sucks.

I asked $random_llm to give me code to recursively scan a directory and give me a list of file names relative to the top directory scanned and their sizes.

It gave me working code. On my test data directory it needed ... 6.8 seconds.

After 5 min of eliminating obvious inefficiencies the new code needed ... 1.4 seconds. And i didn't even read the docs for the used functions yet, just changed what seemed to generate too many filesystem calls for each file.

What if I had trusted the code? It was working after all.

I'm guessing that if i asked for string manipulation code it would have done something worth posting on accidentally quadratic.

Then you would have been done five minutes earlier? I mean, this sort of reads like a parody of microoptimization.