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Comment by odshoifsdhfs | Hacker News Reader

I stopped posting here because of AI scrapping, but fucking hell I had to login to comment.

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.

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User forgot to tell LLM not to duplicate. LLM produced a lovely, working, big line count PR: manager of LLM was happy, keeps paying for it, so all is good right?

I don't really care about the dev future as a few years ago I started to divert from it and most of my income is in other things.

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.

Entire countries have fought entire wars with this m.o. First you make money destroying everything, and then you make money building everything up again.

OOC what's your other income from?

investment rental properties, just normal investments with boring returns, carpentry, electrical installations, handy-man jobs.

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)

Exactly. Precisely. Definitely.

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)

(no particular language, it's just pseudocode)

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.

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.

> And all the people here who are saying that "it works" have no idea as to the amount of technical debt they're creating.

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.

Being clueless has in my experience previously been a rate limiter. Without LLMs these people would simply be much less productive than those with a clue, and problems they don't understand would at best compel them to read and learn, and at worst to simply avoid going too far out of their depth. Either way, it would significantly slow them down compared to their more skilled and experienced peers. The resulting rate of output practically limited the burden of reviewing and maintaining it. Then, eventually skill and experience would hopefully just sort of happen to those that work for it, through exercise and exposure to problems and review feedback.

The justification I’ve been getting from others is that future models will resolve all the tech debt, so paying a cost to iterate fast now is worth it.

We may be way past the point.

Do they actually iterate on their code? Or do they claim they are iterating?

Closing a ticket with more code doesn't count as iterating.

lol they're definitely not iterating on code. Instead they iterate on "ideas", with the expectation that code no longer matters because complexity will be self-resolving with agentic loops.

Unfortunately these tools, and the VCs/companies pushing to adopt them, has totally empowered this type of behaviour.

Does submitting this kind of PR count against their promotion or productivity?

Is there any way it could?

Love to hear from companies making progress on this front.

I wish! My boss at least is checked out and lazy, so he's completely missing the fact that the rest of my team is pushing AI-generated patches that immediately fail testing because they didn't bother to sanity test before pushing. Instead everyone is saying how amazing AI-generated patches are.

I don't know if it is related to promotion, but last few months there has been a push to use more and more AI in everything. As I said in a different comment, I know for a fact that part of the investment they got was contigent on part of it being used on AI.

Why wouldn’t it?

The managers will have no idea this is actively damaging the codebase.

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