logoalt Hacker News

GolDDranks • yesterday at 5:01 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

Just a supplementary fact: I'm in the beneficial position, against the AI, that in a case where it's hard to provide that automatic feedback loop, I can run and test the code at my discretion, whereas the AI model can't.

Yet. Most of my criticism is not after running the code, but after _reading_ the code. It wrote code. I read it. And I am not happy with it. No even need to run it, it's shit at glance.

Replies

elevation • yesterday at 5:17 PM

Yesterday I generated a for-home-use-only PHP app over the weekend with a popular cli LLM product. The app met all my requirements, but the generated code was mixed. It correctly used a prepared query to avoid SQL injection. But then, instead of an obvious:

    "SELECT * FROM table WHERE id=1;"
it gave me:

    $result = $db->query("SELECT * FROM table;");
    for ($row in $result)
        if ($["id"] == 1)
            return $row;
With additional prompting I arrived at code I was comfortable deploying, but this kind of flaw cuts into the total time-savings.
ReverseCold • yesterday at 5:04 PM

> I can run and test the code at my discretion, whereas the AI model can't.

It sounds like you know what the problem with your AI workflow is? Have you tried using an agent? (sorry somewhat snarky but… come on)

➕ show 1 reply
__MatrixMan__ • yesterday at 5:11 PM

You might get better code out of it if you give the AI some more restrictive handcuffs. Spin up a tester instance and have it tell the developer instance to try again until it's happy with the quality.