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Comment by icedchai | Hacker News Reader

You don't think these errors compound? Generated code has 100's of little decisions. Yes, it "usually" works.

LLM’s: sometimes wrong but never in doubt.

Not in my experience. With a proper TDD framework it does better than most programmers at a company who anecdotally have a bug every 2-3 tasks.

The kind of mistakes it makes are usually strange and inhuman though. Like getting hard parts correct while also getting something fundamental about the same problem wrong. And not in the “easy to miss or type wrong” way.

I wish I had an example for you saved, but happens to me pretty frequently. Not only that but it also usually does testing incorrectly at a fundamental level, or builds tests around incorrect assumptions.

I've seen LLMs implement "creative" workarounds. Example: Sonnet 4.5 couldn't figure out how to authenticate a web socket request using whatever framework I was experimenting with, so it decided to just not bother. Instead, it passed the username as part of the web socket request and blindly trusted that user was actually authenticated.

The application looked like it worked. Tests did pass. But if you did a cursory examination of the code, it was all smoke and mirrors.

Yeah recently it had an issue getting OIDC working and decided to implement its own, throwing in a few thousand extra lines. I'm sure there were no security holes created in there at all. /s

Well, the tests passed, right?

yes i wished i had safes some of my best examples too. One i had was super weird in chatgpt pro. It told me that after 30 years my interest would become negative and i would start loosing money. Didnt want to accept the error.

Errors compounding is a meme. In iterated as well as verifiable domains, errors dilute instead of compounding because the llm has repeated chances to notice its failure.

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