Not to detract from this point, but I don’t think I understand what half the code I have written does if it’s been more than a month since I wrote it…
> We depend on our developers to contribute their own work and to stand behind it; large language models cannot do that. A project that discovers such code in its repository may face the unpleasant prospect of reverting significant changes.
At time of writing and commit, I am certain you "stand behind" your code. I think the author refers to the new script kiddies of the AI time. Many do not understand what the AI spits out at time of copy/paste.
No reasonable company pipes stuff directly to prod you still have some code review an d QA. So doesn’t matter if you copy from SO without understanding or LLM generates code that you don’t understand.
Both are bad but still happen and world didn’t crash.
It also generates code customized to your request, so there is temptation to avoid doing even the minimal work of "how do I turn this SO snippet into something that works with my program?"
Which is also very clearly unacceptable. If you just paste code from SO without even understanding what it does, you have fucked up just as hard as if you paste code from an LLM without understanding it.
I’ve definitely worked at places where the time gap between code merge and prod deployment is less than an hour, and no human QA process occurs before code is servicing customers. This approach has risks and rewards, and is one of many reasonable approaches.
As a normal rule somebody copied code from SO after searching for - unique identifier generator in JavaScript - and the code that was the top answer might not be 100% understandable to them but most of it and it doesn't do anything that is extremely weird. When asked what does that bit of code do they probably say it's the unique id generator.
Somebody might ask AI write a login module in JavaScript, inside of that will be a unique identifier generator - what does that bit of code do when asked they reply hmm, not sure, it's from ChatGPT.