That’s why you use unit test and integration test.
I can write bad code myself or copy bad code from who-knows where. It’s not something introduced by LLM.
Remember famous Linus letter? “You code this function without understanding it and thus you code is shit”.
As I said, just a tool like many other before it.
I use it as a regular practice while coding. And to be true, reading my code after that I could not distinguish what parts where LLM and what parts I wrote fully by myself, and, to be honest, I don’t think anyone would be able to tell the difference.
It would probably a nice idea to do some kind of turing test, a put a blind test to distinguish the AI written part of some code, and see how precisely people can tell it apart.
I may come back with a particular piece of code that I specifically remember to be an output from deepseek, and probably withing the whole context it would be indistinguishable.
Also, not all LLM usage is for copying from it. Many times you copy to it and ask the thing yo explain it to you, or ask general questions. For instance, to seek for specific functions in C# extensive libraries.
That’s why you use unit test and integration test.
Good start, but not even close to being enough. What if code introduces UB? Unless you specifically look for that, and nobody does, neither unit nor on-target tests will find it. What if it’s drastically ineffective? What if there are weird and unusual corner cases?
Now you spend more time looking for all of that and designing tests that you didn’t need to do if you had proper practices from the beginning.
It would probably a nice idea to do some kind of turing test, a put a blind test to distinguish the AI written part of some code, and see how precisely people can tell it apart.
But that’s worse! You do realise how that’s worse, right? You lose all the external ways to validate the code, now you have to treat all the code as malicious.
For instance, to seek for specific functions in C# extensive libraries.
And spend twice as much time trying to understand why can’t you find a function that your LLM just invented with absolute certainty of a fancy autocomplete. And if that’s an easy task for you, well, then why do you need this middle layer of randomness. I can’t think of a reason why not to search in the documentation instead of introducing this weird game of “will it lie to me”
Any human written code can and will introduce UB.
Also I don’t see how you will take more that 5 second to verify that a given function does not exist. It has happen to me, llm suggesting unexisting function. And searching by function name in the docs is instantaneous.
I you don’t want to use it don’t. I have been more than a year doing so and I haven’t run into any of those catastrophic issues. It’s just a tool like many others I use for coding. Not even the most important, for instance I think LSP was a greater improvement on my coding efficiency.
It’s like using neovim. Some people would post me a list of all the things that can go bad for making a Frankenstein IDE in a ancient text editor. But if it works for me, it works for me.
Any human written code can and will introduce UB.
And there is enormous amount of safeguards, tricks, practices and tools we come up with to combat it. All of those are categorically unavailable to an autocomplete tool, or a tool who exclusively uses autocomplete tool to code.
Also I don’t see how you will take more that 5 second to verify that a given function does not exist. It has happen to me, llm suggesting unexisting function. And searching by function name in the docs is instantaneous.
Which means you can work with documentation. Which means you really, really don’t need the middle layer, like, at all.
I haven’t run into any of those catastrophic issues.
Glad you didn’t, but also, I’ve reviewed enough generated code to know that a lot of the time people think they’re OK, when in reality they just introduced an esoteric memory leak in a critical section. People who didn’t do it by themselves, but did it because LLM told them to.
I you don’t want to use it don’t.
It’s not about me. It’s about other people introducing shit into our collective lives, making it worse.
