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Comment by dawnerd | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem is it’ll teach you bad habits. For example, Claude and gpt love to use fallbacks. They generate code that’ll get a positive result at any cost, even if it’s horrible in efficient. If you don’t have past knowledge you might just think that’s how it is.

Now before someone says that junior devs make the same mistakes, yes, to some extent.

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And they love to do this in spite of writing "NO FALLBACKS" etc. in your AGENTS.md.

If you don't have the experience you can't provide it with stylistic guidance, or idiomatic patterns or provide examples to direct it.

This leads to the idea that LLMs with existing languages can't really learn new idiomatic patterns.

For new engineers I think new paradigms will emerge that invalidate the need to know the current set of design patterns and idioms. Look at the resurgence of unit tests or the new interests in verification systems.

It seems to do this kind of stuff more when you're not looking too. Like I'll be approving edits all day without any problem then the second I set it to auto it gets a lint error about dead code and adds a pragma to allow the dead code instead of removing it, etc.

> They generate code that’ll get a positive result at any cost, even if it’s horrible in efficient.

If only efficiency is the only problem with that. Sometimes an error state should an error. This is the equivalent of eating all exceptions and pretending all is fine. It just means nothing works.

> it’ll teach you bad habits

So will most programmers

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