alt Hacker NewsI had some shell scripts littered with `|| true`, which was obviously obscuring real errors everywhere. When I challenged the model, it gave me the same "cargo-culting" answer.
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kingforaday • yesterday at 12:38 PM
From your statement and the parent comment, just learned that "cargo cult" is a thing, but cargo-culting as a compound is something AI has made up? [1].
As I was educating myself, I found Richard Feynman's Commencement Speech at Caltech in '74 [2] that might have coined this for our industry? If you would rather listen than read [3]. Posting this for others curious on the term.
1. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Cargo-culting&hl=...
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The `|| true` is often done because people use `errexit` as part of "Bash strict mode"[1], which comes with so many caveats[2] that I usually avoid it. Claude, however, loves it.
[1]: http://redsymbol.net/articles/unofficial-bash-strict-mode/
[2]: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls#set_-euo_pipefail