By skyforbes 
Can AI really understand your messy code — or just make it look cleaner?
When I handed over my tangled Python functions to ChatGPT, I expected magic. What I got instead was something far more revealing about AI, developers, and what “good code” really means.
Every developer has that initial script — a file you hastily created, vowed to tidy up later, and then miraculously evaded for months. Mine happened to be a data-cleaning module consisting of 400+ lines of unadulterated mess: nested loops, duplicate checks, and comments which didn’t conform to code.
One night, out of curiosity (and benevolent self-loathing), I copied it into ChatGPT and entered:
“Improve the readability and maintainability of this Python code.”
What followed was entertaining — part benevolent, part humbling, and part laughable.
This wasn’t an experiment in automation. It was a reality check on how much AI-assisted coding has come — and how much it still stutters.