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258 points signa11 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.248s | source
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kirubakaran ◴[] No.42732804[source]
> A major project will discover that it has merged a lot of AI-generated code

My friend works at a well-known tech company in San Francisco. He was reviewing his junior team member's pull request. When asked what a chunk of code did, the team member matter-of-factly replied "I don't know, chatgpt wrote that"

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alisonatwork ◴[] No.42734461[source]
I have heard the same response from junior devs and external contractors for years, either because they copied something from StackOverflow, or because they copied something from a former client/employer (popular one in China), or even because they just uncritically copied something from another piece of code in the same project.

From the point of view of these sorts of developers they are being paid to make the tests go green or to make some button appear on a page that kindasorta does something in the vague direction of what was in the spec, and that's the end of their responsibility. Unused variables? Doesn't matter. Unreachable code blocks? Doesn't matter. Comments and naming that have nothing to do with the actual business case the code is supposed to be addressing? Doesn't matter.

I have spent a lot of time trying to mentor these sorts of devs and help them to understand why just doing the bare minimum isn't really a good investment in their own career not to mention it's disrespectful of their colleagues who now need to waste time puzzling through their nonsense and eventually (inevitably) fixing their bugs... Seems to get through about 20% of the time. Most of the rest of the time these folks just smile and nod and continue not caring, and companies can't afford the hassle of firing them, then you open LinkedIn years later and turns out somehow they've failed up to manager, architect or executive while you're still struggling along as a code peasant who happens to take pride in their work.

Sorry, got a little carried away. Anywho, the point is LLMs are just another tool for these folks. It's not new, it's just worse now because of the mixed messaging where executives are hyping the tech as a magical solution that will allow them to ship more features for less cost.

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1. 0xEF ◴[] No.42735948[source]
The LLMs are not just another tool for these folks, but for folks who should not be touching code at all. That's the scary part. In my field (industrial automation), I have had to correct issues three times now in the ladder logic on a PLC that drives an automation cell that can definitely kill or hurt someone in the right circumstances (think maintenance/repair). When asked where the logic came from, they showed me the tutorials they feed to their LLM of choice to "teach" it ladder logic, then had it spit out answers to their questions. Safety checks were missed, needless to say, which thankfully only broke the machines.

These are young controls engineers at big companies. I won't say who, but many of you probably use one of their products to go to your own job.

I am not against using LLMs as a sort of rubber duck to bounce ideas off of or maybe get you thinking in a different directions for the sake of problem solving, but letting them do the work for you and not understanding how to check the validity of that work is maddeningly dangerous in some situations.