"So, we want to know all the possible states this could go through. We gave that task to OpenAI with the following prompt."
He shows me a sample prompt they would've sent to OpenAI. It started with the premise "You are a senior Ruby developer with ten years experience. Read through this source file and give me a list of all the code paths which involves global variables".
"Really?" I said, amused. I knew ahead of time that this project they were turning over is LLM-heavy. I have misgivings about LLMs but I try to keep an open mind so it was really impressive that it was used at this stage. "How well did it work?"
"It didn't. Instead we parsed it to a syntax tree and just performed static code analysis."
(Usual disclaimer that details of the anecdote were changed/obfuscated but the spirit of the interaction has been preserved.)