Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vinnymac 85 days ago
Well said. I have to review PRs of non-software developers nowadays.

The “what is this trying to do?” has never been harder to answer than before. It creates scenarios where 99% is correct, but the most important area is subtly broken. I prefer it to be human, where 60-80% will be correct, and the problematic areas begin to smell more and more gradually.

In my experience LLMs, at times, may hide the truth from you in a haystack made of needles.

1 comments

This very matches my observation. The error isn't due to incorrect code—it's code that looks specific to your system but is actually generic patterns applied from the training process. The structure is correct, the logic is sound, it just doesn't interact with what your source code actually does.

Harder to catch because nothing is factually wrong. You have to ask: could this output have been produced without actually reading my codebase?