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Comment by WaitWaitWha | Hacker News Reader

I am confident that you do understand it at time of writing.

> We depend on our developers to contribute their own work and to stand behind it; large language models cannot do that. A project that discovers such code in its repository may face the unpleasant prospect of reverting significant changes.

At time of writing and commit, I am certain you "stand behind" your code. I think the author refers to the new script kiddies of the AI time. Many do not understand what the AI spits out at time of copy/paste.

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Sounds a lot like bashing copy pasting from StackOverflow. So also like old argument “kids these days”.

No reasonable company pipes stuff directly to prod you still have some code review an d QA. So doesn’t matter if you copy from SO without understanding or LLM generates code that you don’t understand.

Both are bad but still happen and world didn’t crash.

LLM can generate a larger chunk of code then you'll find on SO, so I think it's a larger issue to have LLM code then copy-pasted SO code.

> LLM can generate a larger chunk of code then you'll find on SO, so I think it's a larger issue to have LLM code then copy-pasted SO code.

It also generates code customized to your request, so there is temptation to avoid doing even the minimal work of "how do I turn this SO snippet into something that works with my program?"

I also think that it would be a nightmare to properly review a large PR of exclusively AI code. If you take the time to understand what it's doing, and find as many little bugs and edge cases as possible, you may as well have just written it yourself.

agreement here -

As a normal rule somebody copied code from SO after searching for - unique identifier generator in JavaScript - and the code that was the top answer might not be 100% understandable to them but most of it and it doesn't do anything that is extremely weird. When asked what does that bit of code do they probably say it's the unique id generator.

Somebody might ask AI write a login module in JavaScript, inside of that will be a unique identifier generator - what does that bit of code do when asked they reply hmm, not sure, it's from ChatGPT.

> Sounds a lot like bashing copy pasting from StackOverflow.

Which is also very clearly unacceptable. If you just paste code from SO without even understanding what it does, you have fucked up just as hard as if you paste code from an LLM without understanding it.

> No reasonable company pipes stuff directly to prod

I’ve definitely worked at places where the time gap between code merge and prod deployment is less than an hour, and no human QA process occurs before code is servicing customers. This approach has risks and rewards, and is one of many reasonable approaches.

Yes, I've worked on small teams of highly experienced people where code reviews may only happen a couple times a year for the purpose of knowledge transfer. This is how I've seen it work on what I would consider the most critical and best performing code I've been exposed to. High volume, high stakes stuff in finance and health care.

It's not very common for people to do drive-by pull requests that just copy code from Stack Overflow on open source projects. I've already started seeing that with LLM generated code. And yeah, hopefully the problems with it are caught, but it wastes the maintainers time and drives maintainer Burnout.

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