Comment by xmprt
3 days ago
> Using apis I am familiar with but don't have memorized
I think you have to be careful here even with a typed language. For example, I generated some Go code recently which execed a shell command and got the output. The generated code used CombinedOutput which is easier to used but doesn't do proper error handling. Everything ran fine until I tested a few error cases and then realized the problem. In other times I asked the agent to write tests cases too and while it scaffolded code to handle error cases, it didn't actually write any tests cases to exercise that - so if you were only doing a cursory review, you would think it was properly tested when in reality it wasn't.
You always have to be careful. But worth calling out that using CombinedOutput() like that is also a common flaw in human code.
The difference is that humans learn. I got bit by this behavior of CombinedOutput once ten years ago, and no longer make this mistake.
This applies to AI, too, albeit in different ways:
1. You can iteratively improve the rules and prompts you give to the AI when coding. I do this a lot. My process is constantly improving, and the AI makes fewer mistakes as a result.
2. AI models get smarter. Just in the past few months, the LLMs I use to code are making significantly fewer mistakes than they were.
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