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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

> and that is not great code

When you say "is not great code" can you elaborate? Does the code work or not?

I don't know, I would assume it works but I would not expect it to be free of bugs. But that is the baseline for code, being correct - up to some bugs - is the absolute minimum requirement, code quality starts from there - is it efficient, is it secure, is it understandable, is it maintainable, ...

So do you expect it not to be free of bugs because you've run a comprehensive test on it, read all of the code yourself or are you just concluding that because you know it was generated by an LLM?

It has not been formally verified which is essentially the only way to achieve code without defects with reasonable confidence. There are several studies that have found that there are roughly between one and twenty bugs per thousand lines of code in any software, this project has several thousand lines of code, so I would expect several bugs if written by humans and I have no reason to assume that large language models outperform humans in this respect, not at last because they are trained on code written by humans and have been trained to generate code as written by humans.

But you said "it's not great code" and then said "i don't know", so your idea of it being "not great code" is purely speculative and totally unfounded.

No, my judgment of not great code is not based on what the code does - and if it does so correctly - but on how the code is written. Those are independent things, you can have horrible code that does what it is supposed to do but you can also have great code that just does the wrong thing [1].

[1] I would however argue the later thing is more rare as it requires competent developers, however this still does not preclude some misunderstanding of the requirements.

It works really well, multiple people have been using it for a month or so (including me) and it's flawless. I think "not great" means "not very readable by humans", but it wasn't really meant to be readable.

I don't know if there are underlying bugs, but I haven't hit any, and the architecture (which I do know about) is sane.

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