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Comment by sdevonoes | Hacker News Reader

> At some point this starts to look like we're all just moving complexity from the more formal and deterministic world of programming languages to the informal and non-deterministic world of natural language.

This is the problem nobody is talking about. I see codebases growing in MD files with instructions and guidelines and requests that are also LLM generated… and it’s all piling up. No one is reviewing it 100% , and even when we do, it’s all very subjective. What’s the difference between “Follow a RESTful approach”, “We use REST, not graphql”, “90% of our endpoints are resource oriented, but we have a couple of endpoints that look rpc-ish; please ignore the latter”… It’s all very stupid.

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This is why you need to be generating more linter rules instead of just having things be in markdown files.

I had never written an eslint rule until i started having agents pump them out for me and now I've encoded a bunch of important rules as lint rules that will fail CI if violated.

Who lints the linters

Linter linters, obviously

It's linters all the way down

A linter won't prevent your idiot LLM from going bonkers and suddenly switching to GQL instead of REST just for that one endpoint, because it confabulated something or putting your stripe secret into your react frontend - all cases of slop I've seen happen.

That's why we still do code review. The linter rules is just about lowering the amount of mistakes you have to catch at code review time.

> The linter rules is just about lowering the amount of mistakes you have to catch at code review time.

Aren't they, in the modern context, mostly used for code formatting and such? I don't recall anyone using them today for "catching errors". Unless you count code formatting style violations as 'errors'.

Maybe in whatever language ecosystem you are in, but in the javsacript world most projects have tons of eslint rules that are specifically designed to stop bugs.

Like for instance there are tons of eslint rules to make sure you aren't breaking the rules of react, like having missing dependencies in a useEffect dependencies array, or calling a react hook conditionally.

Software loose on theory[1] trying to compensate with moar md.

[1] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

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