Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes

[Recycled from an older dupe submission]

As much as I've agreed with the author's other posts/takes, I find myself resisting this one:

> I'll finish this rant with a related observation: I keep seeing people say “if I have to review every line of code an LLM writes, it would have been faster to write it myself!”

> Those people are loudly declaring that they have under-invested in the crucial skills of reading, understanding and reviewing code written by other people.

No, that does not follow.

1. Reviewing depends on what you know about the expertise (and trust) of the person writing it. Spending most of your day reviewing code written by familiar human co-workers is very different from the same time reviewing anonymous contributions.

2. Reviews are not just about the code's potential mechanics, but inferring and comparing the intent and approach of the writer. For LLMs, that ranges between non-existent and schizoid, and writing it yourself skips that cost.

3. Motivation is important, for some developers that means learning, understanding and creating. Not wanting to do code reviews all day doesn't mean you're bad at them. Also, reviewing an LLM's code has no social aspect.

However you do it, somebody else should still be reviewing the change afterwards.

Yeah, I strongly disagree with this too.

I've spent a lot of time reviewing code and doing code audits for security (far more than the average engineer) and reading code still takes longer than writing it, particularly when it is dense and you cannot actually trust the comments and variable names to be true.

AI is completely untrustable in that sense. The English and code have no particular reason to align so you really need to read the code itself.

These models may also use unfamiliar idioms where you don't know the edge cases where you either have to fight the model to do it a different way, or go investigate the idiom and think through the edge cases if you really want to understand it.

I think most people just don't read the code these models produce at all and just click accept and then just see if tests pass or just look at the output manually.

I am still trying to give it a go, and sometimes it really does make things easier on simpler tasks and I am blown away, and it has been getting better, but I feel like I need to set myself a hard timeout with these tools where if they haven't done basically what I wanted quickly, I should just start from scratch since the task is beyond them and I'll spend more time on the back and forth.

They are useful for giving me the motivation to do things that I'm avoiding because they're too boring though because after fighting with them for 20 minutes I'm ready to go write the code.