4 ms·

Couldn't take an article seriously that started with the author claiming that code he writes by hand is "100% correct" Bruh

jaggederest 4d ago
I've gone back over most of my contributions to open source using LLMs and honestly, even though it was my best work at the time, there are big gaps that they find right away. The myth that we've been shipping perfect code for years, but you can't trust LLMs, is just subjective blindness. People can't see the issues that they can't see, definitionally. You can absolutely use the exact techniques we used to use in "the old days" to produce reliable code with LLMs generating most of it. The issue is, it's really not a lot less conceptual and intellectual effort than in "the old days", at root. You speed up the programming part, but the rest is still a hard slog, so nobody is out here doing really thorough testing in ways we used to dream of.
- conradludgate 4d ago
  Likewise, I've found many bugs using LLMs in the small software libraries I hand wrote and considered complete and correct - even though it was my sole focus at the time and I thought I had perfected it
  - matheusmoreira 4d ago
    Same. Frontier LLM code review proved to be a very humbling experience for me.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4d ago
    I have had the same experience. I’m still in the process of revisiting and refining the many hand-coded dependencies that I’ve created, over the years. Most of the issues found, were corner cases, that would likely never be encountered, but they are issues, nonetheless.
- bigstrat2003 4d ago
  We definitely haven't been writing completely correct code in the past. But even so, the code LLMs write has more issues than the code humans write.
  - jaggederest 4d ago
    Do you have any analytic basis to make that assertion? I haven't found that to be true, it'd be more accurate in my experience to say that LLM code has different issues than the code humans write.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4d ago
    This seems to be changing, in the year of heavy LLM use that I’ve done. When I started, I had to review every line, and frequently found bugs, but lately, I’ve been impressed with the quality of the code. I don’t think that I’ve had to make any code-level adjustments, in a while.
  - julianlam 4d ago
    Six months ago this ceased to be the case for some (if not most), and the quality of LLM generated code has increased over time. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news: human coding has not improved a lick since then.
- al_borland 4d ago
  I think the issue people run into is that the types of errors the LLM makes are ones humans wouldn’t make, like having a basic misunderstanding of the goal of the software and making silly logic errors that technically work, but don’t serve the correct purpose. This can be seen more clearly with self-driving cars as an example. A self-driving car may be safer than a human driver, but when the self-driving car plows into the side of a semi truck in broad daylight… that’s generally not a mistake a human would make. Humans and AI have different failure modes, so when AI fails where we generally wouldn’t, it really stands out and gets judged harshly.
conradludgate 4d ago
she*
deleted 4d ago
[deleted]
joegibbs 4d ago
I also write 100% correct code, it does exactly what I wrote it to do (not compile).
purplesyringa 4d ago
I won't lie, of course my code has bugs. The difference, as I see it, is the kinds of bugs that manifest, and how well they can be avoided. There are two steps to writing the program: building a model in your head to map understanding to algorithms, and then implementing the algorithm in code (and of course this can get recursive if the algorithm relies on other high-level mechanisms, like data structures). I have found that most of the time, the kind of bugs that unit tests find are typos, i.e. mistakes in the second step; but the errors that actually cost time to resolve are errors in understanding, i.e. the first step. They can't be found with testing or verification because what it means for code to be correct depends on the specification, and the error is that the specification itself is incorrect. Asking an LLM to check this one specific part of the software is thus useless, and whole-program analysis is not cheap enough to employ at this point. So what about avoidance? When I say hand-written code is 100% correct (or at least approaches that number), I mean that with experience, I learn more about which models tend to be correct, and thus avoid bugs of the latter kind by construction. Of course typos still exist, which is why I write unit tests, and I expect LLMs to be able to find them as well; but I believe the only way to avoid incorrect models is to learn stuff by doing, failing and failing again, figuring out nitty-gritty low-level details, until at some point you become an expert in that area and know what to use.
VCFundedGenYer 4d ago
It may not be 100%, but human code is objectively more reliable and higher quality than any LLM generated slop code.

jaggederest 4d ago

I've gone back over most of my contributions to open source using LLMs and honestly, even though it was my best work at the time, there are big gaps that they find right away. The myth that we've been shipping perfect code for years, but you can't trust LLMs, is just subjective blindness. People can't see the issues that they can't see, definitionally. You can absolutely use the exact techniques we used to use in "the old days" to produce reliable code with LLMs generating most of it. The issue is, it's really not a lot less conceptual and intellectual effort than in "the old days", at root. You speed up the programming part, but the rest is still a hard slog, so nobody is out here doing really thorough testing in ways we used to dream of.

conradludgate 4d ago
Likewise, I've found many bugs using LLMs in the small software libraries I hand wrote and considered complete and correct - even though it was my sole focus at the time and I thought I had perfected it
- matheusmoreira 4d ago
  Same. Frontier LLM code review proved to be a very humbling experience for me.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4d ago
  I have had the same experience. I’m still in the process of revisiting and refining the many hand-coded dependencies that I’ve created, over the years. Most of the issues found, were corner cases, that would likely never be encountered, but they are issues, nonetheless.
bigstrat2003 4d ago
We definitely haven't been writing completely correct code in the past. But even so, the code LLMs write has more issues than the code humans write.
- jaggederest 4d ago
  Do you have any analytic basis to make that assertion? I haven't found that to be true, it'd be more accurate in my experience to say that LLM code has different issues than the code humans write.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4d ago
  This seems to be changing, in the year of heavy LLM use that I’ve done. When I started, I had to review every line, and frequently found bugs, but lately, I’ve been impressed with the quality of the code. I don’t think that I’ve had to make any code-level adjustments, in a while.
- julianlam 4d ago
  Six months ago this ceased to be the case for some (if not most), and the quality of LLM generated code has increased over time. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news: human coding has not improved a lick since then.
al_borland 4d ago
I think the issue people run into is that the types of errors the LLM makes are ones humans wouldn’t make, like having a basic misunderstanding of the goal of the software and making silly logic errors that technically work, but don’t serve the correct purpose. This can be seen more clearly with self-driving cars as an example. A self-driving car may be safer than a human driver, but when the self-driving car plows into the side of a semi truck in broad daylight… that’s generally not a mistake a human would make. Humans and AI have different failure modes, so when AI fails where we generally wouldn’t, it really stands out and gets judged harshly.

conradludgate 4d ago

she*

deleted 4d ago

[deleted]

joegibbs 4d ago

I also write 100% correct code, it does exactly what I wrote it to do (not compile).

purplesyringa 4d ago

I won't lie, of course my code has bugs. The difference, as I see it, is the kinds of bugs that manifest, and how well they can be avoided. There are two steps to writing the program: building a model in your head to map understanding to algorithms, and then implementing the algorithm in code (and of course this can get recursive if the algorithm relies on other high-level mechanisms, like data structures). I have found that most of the time, the kind of bugs that unit tests find are typos, i.e. mistakes in the second step; but the errors that actually cost time to resolve are errors in understanding, i.e. the first step. They can't be found with testing or verification because what it means for code to be correct depends on the specification, and the error is that the specification itself is incorrect. Asking an LLM to check this one specific part of the software is thus useless, and whole-program analysis is not cheap enough to employ at this point. So what about avoidance? When I say hand-written code is 100% correct (or at least approaches that number), I mean that with experience, I learn more about which models tend to be correct, and thus avoid bugs of the latter kind by construction. Of course typos still exist, which is why I write unit tests, and I expect LLMs to be able to find them as well; but I believe the only way to avoid incorrect models is to learn stuff by doing, failing and failing again, figuring out nitty-gritty low-level details, until at some point you become an expert in that area and know what to use.

VCFundedGenYer 4d ago

It may not be 100%, but human code is objectively more reliable and higher quality than any LLM generated slop code.