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by jeswin 598 days ago
> Using an autocomplete to "bang it out" seems foolish.

Based on my own experience, I find the widespread scepticism on HN about AI-assisted coding misplaced. There will be corner cases, there will be errors, and there will be bugs. There will also be apps for which AI is not helpful at all. But that's fine - nobody is saying otherwise. The question is only about whether it is a _significant_ nett saving on the time spent across various project types. The answer to that is a resounding Yes.

The entire set of tests for a web framework I wrote recently were generated with Claude and GPT. You can see them here: https://github.com/webjsx/webjsx/tree/main/src/test

On an average, these tests are better than tests I would have written myself. The project was written mostly by AI as well, like most other stuff I've written since GPT4 came out.

"Using an autocomplete to bang it out" is exactly what one should do - in most cases.
2 comments
beepbooptheory 598 days ago
Ok but looking at those tests for just a second (for createElement), you might want to go through it again, or ask the computer or whatever. For example, edgeCases.test.ts is totally redundant, you are running the same exact tests in children.test.ts.

Edit: such a LLM repo... why did it feel the need to recreate these DOM types? Is your AI just trying to maximize LoC? It just seems like such a pain and potential source of real trouble when these are already available. https://github.com/webjsx/webjsx/blob/main/src%2FjsxTypes.ts

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jeswin 597 days ago
Actually, the file you identified is the (only) one that's mostly human written. It came from a previous project, I may be able to get rid of it.

But generally, the tests are very useful. My point is that there will be redundancies, and maybe even bugs - and that's fine, because the time needed to fix these would be much less than what it would have taken to write them from scratch.

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thanksgiving 598 days ago
I want to bring my own experience from a code base I briefly worked on, I worked on a module of code where basically all the unit tests assertions were commented out. This was about ten years ago. The meta is there should still be someone responsible for the code an LLM generated and there should still be at least one more person who does a decent code review at some point. Otherwise, the unit tests being there is useless just like the example I gave on top with the assertions removed.
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