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Comment by rgovostes | Hacker News Reader

I was momentarily confused because I had commented out an importmap in my HTML with , and yet my Vite build product contained <script type="importmap"></script>, magically uncommented again. I tracked it down to a regex in Vite for extracting importmap tags, oblivious to the comment markers.

It is discomfiting that the JS ecosystem relies heavily on layers of source-to-source transformations, tree shaking, minimization, module format conversion, etc. We assume that these are built on spec-compliant parsers, like one would find with C compilers. Are they? Or are they built with unsound string transformations that work in 99% of cases for expediency?

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These are the questions a good engineer should ask, as for the answer, this is the burden of open source. Crack open the code.

Ask a modern LLM, like Gemini Pro 2.5. Takes a few minutes to get the answer, including gathering the code and pasting it into the prompt.

> Takes a few minutes to get the answer [...]

... then waste a few hundred minutes being misled by hallucination. It's quite the opposite of what "cracking open the code" is.

Not to forget the energy and computational power wasted to get that answer as well. It’s mindboggling how willingly some people will let their brain get degenerate by handing out shallow debugging tasks to LLMs.

You could look at it as wasting your brain on tasks like that. You start off with a full cup of water each task takes a portion. Farming out thought to an llm can allow you to focus on the next task or the overall before your cup is empty and you need to rest.

The average query is equivalent to 1.1m of driving an electric car. It’s fine, really.

I ran into one of the most frightening instances of this recently with Gemini 2.5 Pro.

It insisted that Go 1.25 had made a breaking change to the filepath.Join API. It hallucinated documentation to that effect on both the standard page and release notes. It refused to use web search to correct itself. When I finally (by convincing it that is was another AI checking the previous AIs work) got it to read the page, it claimed that the Go team had modified their release notes after the fact to remove information about the breaking change.

I find myself increasingly convinced that regardless of the “intelligence” of LLMs, they should be kept far away from access to critical systems.

I've found that when any of these agents start going down a really wrong path, you just have to start a new session. I don't think I've ever had success at "redirecting" it once it starts doing weird shit and I assume this is a limitation of next-token prediction since the wrong path is still in the context window. When this happens I often have success telling it to summarize the TODOs/next steps, edit them if I have to remove weird or incorrect goals, and then paste them into a new session.

Like social media, they'll seem benign until they're inervated the populace and start a digital fascism.

> including gathering the code

LLMs are very reliable when asked about things in their own context window, which is what I recommended.

I'm increasingly convinced that most of the people still complaining about hallucinations with regard to programming just haven't actually used any of the tools in more than a year or two. Or they ran into a bias-confirming speedbump and gave up. Agents obviously hallucinate, because their default and only mode is hallucination, but seeing people insist that they do it too much to be useful just feels like I'm reading an archive of HN from 2022.

Personally I think they are useful, but in a much narrow way than they are often sold as. For things I'm very familiar with, they seem to reduce my productivity by a good chunk. For things I don't want to do like writing some kinds of tests it's probably about the same, but then I don't have to do it, which is a win. For things I'm not very familiar with it probably is at least 2x faster to do with LLM, but that tends to diminish quickly. For example, I recently vibe coded a website using NextJS without knowing almost anything about it. Incredibly fast to get started by applying my existing knowledge of other systems/concepts and using the LLM to extend it to a new space. A week or so of full time work on it later I'm at the point where I know I can get most things done faster by hand, with the occasional LLM detour for things I haven't touched before

It depends on the model knowledge base and what you are trying to do. Something modern with the Buffalo framework in golang many hallucinations. A php blog written in 2005 no hallucinations.

This is the kind of thing that works until it spectacularly does not. XML parsing with regex is fine for simple, well-controlled cases but breaks as soon as you hit edge cases. We learned this the hard way trying to parse security questionnaire exports. Started with regex, ended up rewriting with a proper XML parser after hitting too many weird formatting issues.

I ran into many similar problems, sadly I don't think your example is an outlier. I had to write my own simple HTML bundler (https://github.com/jeff-hykin/html-bundle), not cause I want to or because I care about bundling, but just to know that it was done correctly.

This is why I basically never trust npm packages unless I know the authors, like the standard library from the Deno team, or people like Ryan Carniato or Evan Yu.

Ironically, Evan You created Vite, though it looks like he hasn't been actively committing to it since 2022.

Fun thing to know - commented out code is still a node in DOM tree (with nodeType: COMMENT_NODE), so there shouldn't be a need for regex (if that's done via regex)

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