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Comment by watermelon0 | Hacker News Reader

You can use it without understanding, but this won't help you actually understand how it behaves.

I believe I can understand how a library behaves from the README and docs. I do this all the time. We all do.

You haven't run into cases where the documentation is missing or incomplete? You must be dealing with different libraries than I am.

Of course. And then we fix the problem. It's no different here. The point is that reading the code first is absolutely not a requirement when adopting a new library.

It is not. But there’s an element of trust being involved. Something like libflac or libcurl, I don’t read the code. I read the doc which does outline the behavior of each function and the conceptual model. If something break, it’s quite often my code. Why? because their code is battle tested. Which is quite different from AI generated code.

That's because it's new. libflac and libcurl didn't come out as battle tested code. That takes time and...battles. And what are those battles if not people seeing issues with what those libraries are doing and fixing the code? There absolutely no reason that AI written code can't or won't become battle tested.

The battle tested part is the reason I suspect my code rather than theirs first. The trust part is in their engineering process. New project from OpenBSD or Debian, I’m ready to try. Random guy on Github, bring out the 10 foot pole.

You can’t say a new project is battle tested. Those are mutually exclusive, regardless of who or what wrote the code.

> There absolutely no reason that AI written code can't or won't become battle tested.

I can think of 2:

1. Low trust: I'm not going to trust some rando's AI-generated code/PR when I can make my own AI generated code. Maintainer will (rightly) not trust my awesome AI-generated PR because I'm a rando to them.

2. Fragmentation, if a lot of people are doing (1), they wont contribute to the same upstream codebase like they would in the past, which means each codebase only runs through a small subset of potential environments.

The interplay between 1 & 2 will result in a lot of siloed code, with no accounting for taste (i.e. sensibilities developed by maintainers)

Low trust is not a reason that code can’t be battle tested. All non battle tested code starts as low trust by default. AI written or otherwise. I’m not even sure what you mean by fragmentation tbh. This feels like a very vague argument in general.

But you’re right that it’s the hill climb of human trust that AI is going through right now. Some of us are just farther along than others. Some of us refuse to consider trusting AI out of fear, and not rational evaluation of its capability.

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