Comment by OutOfHere
6 months ago
Just as a thought exercise, the better kill switch is a dead man switch that is disarmed every month or two until its next run, also one that acts as malicious ransomware that deletes everything including itself and all logs.
Obviously don't do this, because you don't want to be more morally bankrupt than your employer, or your whole argument of righteousness falls apart. The morally righteous never would, because they already know that employment in the US is voluntary for both sides. Also, over time, one would absolutely forget to disarm it.
the best kill switch is to write a slop codebase only you understand. no intentional evil little mechanisms, no intentional breaking, just the slop, slop written in good faith. now that is legal
To be fair, LLM can cut through unclear codebases like a hot knife through butter. The LLM may make some mistakes, but it gets the general idea.
There is one exception. It is when the code has no type definitions and obfuscated variable names, or worse yet, has incorrect type definitions and misleading variable names, but such code is not maintainable at all anyway, even for oneself.
In summary, even for the author to understand a codebase over a long period, it has to be well organized because human memory doesn't recall all the little details.