Exactly. Precisely. Definitely.

I see what you describe all the time, because I do review the code the models do produce.

It's not just incredibly verbose: it's constantly missing that there's an obvious, elegant, small, way to solve what was asked and instead it goes ballistic and creates nonsense.

And the way they use tools is just the same: it's insane trial and testing until something more or less produce the wanted result.

I've explained it here already but the craziest I had was, like you, a one line test that was basically the following:

    if ( a >= 0xab000000 && a <= 0xabffffff)

(no particular language, it's just pseudocode)

But the model decide to go nuts: it noticed a pattern (just like it notices a pattern in your example) and decided to convert the native integers to strings to then do substring matching on the hexadecimal representation of the number.

I.

Shit.

You.

Not.

And all the people here who are saying that "it works" have no idea as to the amount of technical debt they're creating.

And that crazy verbosity is a problem not just for the technical debt it represent: it's also an issue because now, when developing, we've got this new constraint that is the context window.

It's a nice tool but it should be used with caution.

Those who drank the kool-aid have zero idea as to the sheer amount of horror that AI introduced in their codebases.