alt Hacker News> coding for situations that either do not happen or are unlikely to happen.
Not coding for situations that “do not happen” is exactly what creates vulnerabilities. But I also don’t think that such code is the main source of complexity in LLM-generated code.
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Idk I routinely see the LLMs repeat validations that already happen in another layer or it imagines things that don't exist
I vibe-slopped a small and local forms application for my family. I explicitly mentioned that fact to the LLM.
Yet, I removed 2/3s of the code, because it triple-checked that every file really existed and was valid, that the input form was less than a million bytes in size, that there were propper HTTP status codes for everything, that every possible error from reading data was eagerly checked and caught, and so on.
Like come on, three people will ever look at it. So keep it small and tidy so I can understand it better!
An example to what I'm talking about: I have application that takes two inputs from request. I've put in validation on request values to deny values that are greater than 100. In my code I'm adding these values. LLM can say "cater for addition of these two numbers, because they might go over MAX_INT and result in overflow". This is a situation that won't happen. LLM can recommend - add assertions. That's unnecessary.