Comment by atrettel

I agree with the notion that LLMs may just end up repeating coding mistakes of the past because they are statistically likely mistakes.

I'm reminded of an old quote by Dijkstra about Fortran [1]: "In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included."

I've encountered that same problem in some older scientific codes (both C and Fortran). After a while, the bugs somewhat become features because people just don't know to question them anymore. To me, this is why it is important to understand the code thoroughly enough to question what is going on (regardless of who or what wrote it).

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498...