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traestoday at 8:05 AM0 repliesview on HN

Out of curiosity, what is the largest C program you have written pre-LLM, and did you ever try to run it through valgrind*? The "oversights" in C tend to be extremely subtle and dangerous, and of a type that would be impossible to make in Go (or Rust or Common Lisp or whatever.) I do not have confidence in LLMs not falling victim to these subtleties at least once in a large application. I could be totally wrong! Perhaps they can all be found with a sufficient adversarial loops or something. I just have a really hard time imagining no problems of this sort occuring.

*(Memory leaks can probably be found by just having the LLM run valgrind itself and chase them down, but this gives you a good feel for the difficulties of writing safe C. Again, never tried any of this with LLMs myself, and I haven't written a nontrivial C program in years.)