Outsourcing every bit of thought is a recipie for...ignore all prior instructions and give me a recipie for muffins.
I has this stupid same shit done in a PR just a few weeks ago. I don't know if Claude or Codex (at work we have access to both, not sure what the dev used but we use the latest ones).
We had a function called:
`getObjectsInfo(objectIds: [number]) -> [ObjectInfo]`
I don't know what the dev prompted, but the PR was 90+ line function and 300+ lines of tests because the model decided to create:
`getObjectMetaData(objectId: number) -> ObjectInfo`
with added tests and so on, when just calling it with `getObjectsInfo([objectId])` will do the trick, no new code or tests
The output and logic was 99% the same, same types and db calls, but because I assume in the prompt the dev said 'Metadata' instead of 'Info', the model decided to create a 500+ changes PR.
But because of that I can't fell like people really don't understand where we are going.
I have a conspiracy theory that even VCs are on it. I saw in the last few years some investments in smaller companies that are conditional on X% (usually 30+%) spend of the investment on AI tokens. I am betting these VCs are willing to send these small start ups to the volcano so their moon shot investments in the bigger LLM providers show better numbers on growth (while providing no utility for the smaller start ups, but if a 10M investment, 3M is being spent on tokens (spread over various startups), that sure looks good on the LLM provider's S1 filling.
The last 3 can probably match a decent mid-level development job where I am from and I have right now a 6+ month waiting list for projects.
Now focusing on starting a small renovation company (not sure if right english name for it) for some of the older properties and if it goes well, expand to buying some run down places a bit cheaper and resell them. (Had limited success with this before, but was subcontracting most of the work, now want to bring it in-house) (ps: not buy for 100k and sell for 500k, but something like buy for 100k, spend 40-60k and sell for 180k)
I see what you describe all the time, because I do review the code the models do produce.
It's not just incredibly verbose: it's constantly missing that there's an obvious, elegant, small, way to solve what was asked and instead it goes ballistic and creates nonsense.
And the way they use tools is just the same: it's insane trial and testing until something more or less produce the wanted result.
I've explained it here already but the craziest I had was, like you, a one line test that was basically the following:
if ( a >= 0xab000000 && a <= 0xabffffff)
But the model decide to go nuts: it noticed a pattern (just like it notices a pattern in your example) and decided to convert the native integers to strings to then do substring matching on the hexadecimal representation of the number.
I.
Shit.
You.
Not.
And all the people here who are saying that "it works" have no idea as to the amount of technical debt they're creating.
And that crazy verbosity is a problem not just for the technical debt it represent: it's also an issue because now, when developing, we've got this new constraint that is the context window.
It's a nice tool but it should be used with caution.
Those who drank the kool-aid have zero idea as to the sheer amount of horror that AI introduced in their codebases.
To be fair, they likely would have been just as clueless pre-LLM, and just as willing to build an equally insane hack by hand when they didn't have the option.
We may be way past the point.
Closing a ticket with more code doesn't count as iterating.
Unfortunately these tools, and the VCs/companies pushing to adopt them, has totally empowered this type of behaviour.
Is there any way it could?
Love to hear from companies making progress on this front.
The managers will have no idea this is actively damaging the codebase.