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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4646 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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The LLM will cheat and write test that don't test what they claim to, bypass tests when they fail, write docs that make zero sense, write code that doesn't follow the docs etc.

OK but that's why you do manual testing... also you can always ask other models to check on the work.

If anyone with a modicum of coding experience took a look at your slop app, he would only see an awful, unmaintainable mess.

IDK I shared the code with my friend who's a Staff Engineer and he was pretty impressed especially since I've been really diligent about implementing good practices like separation of concerns, test driven development, DRY, determining architecture and reviewing it before implementing etc.

I'm not a moron - I've been a technical PM for 10 years now working on enterprise software and I've had plenty experience reviewing my dev's PRs and doing my own bug investigations as well as evaluating engineering solutions.

This dismissive attitude is only going to get less accurate as time goes on and models improve.

I've been really diligent about implementing good practices like...

I wonder how long it'll be before "implementing" those practices is as simple as writing a good initial prompt for the coding agent to follow. And how long after that that "do it well" (or nothing at all) would sufficient for it to follow those practices by default.

Remember that LLM capabilities will only improve over time (barring severe government action, at least). Also remember that GPT-3 was released in 2020: Getting all the low-hanging fruit (never mind all the incremental improvements) from a novel technology in six years would be a fantastic achievement, so I don't think we're anywhere close to done.

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