Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes

I use ChatGPT to generate code a lot, and it's certainly useful, but it has given me issues that are not obvious.

For example, I had it generate some C code to be used with ZeroMQ a few months ago. The code looked absolutely fine, and it mostly worked fine, but it made a mistake with its memory allocation stuff that caused it to segfault sometimes, and corrupt memory other times.

Fortunately, this was such a small project and I already know how to write code, so it wasn't too hard for me to find and fix, though I am slightly concerned that some people are copypasting large swaths of code from ChatGPT that looks mostly fine but hides subtle bugs.

And subtle bugs existed pre-2022, how often my apps are updated for "minor bug fixes" would mean this is par for the course.

Sure, it's possible that the code it gave me was based on some incorrectly written code it scraped from Gitlab or something.

I'm not a luddite, I'm perfectly fine with people using AI for writing code. The only thing that really concerns me is that it has the potential to generate a ton of shitty code that doesn't look shitty, creating a lot of surface area for debugging.

Prior to AI, the quantity of crappy code that could be generated was basically limited by the speed in which a human could write it, but now there's really no limit.

Again, just to reiterate, this isn't "old man yells at cloud". I think AI is pretty cool, I use it all the time, I don't even have a problem with people generating large quantities of code, it's just something we have to be a bit more weary of.

>though I am slightly concerned that some people are copypasting large swaths of code from ChatGPT that looks mostly fine but hides subtle bugs.

They used to do the same with Stack Overflow. But now it's more dangerous, because the code can be "subtly wrong in ways the user can't fathom" to order.

Agree, just means less time developing and more time on quality control.

Yeah, there's effectively no limit to how much code that you can have.

We're all guilty of copypasting from Stack Overflow, but as you said, that's not made to order. In order to use the code copied from there, you will likely have to edit it, at least a bit to fit your application, meaning that it does require a bit of understanding of what you're doing.

Since ChatGPT can be completely tuned to what you want without writing code, it's far more tempting to just copy and paste from it without auditing it.

The beauty of stack overflow is that the code you are copying and pasting has been reviewed and voted on by a decent number of other programmers