Comment by Verdex
1 month ago
This last week:
* One developer tried to refactor a bunch of graph ql with an LLM and ended up checking in a bunch of completely broken code. Thankfully there were api tests.
* One developer has an LLM making his PRs. He slurped up my unfinished branch, PRed it, and merged (!) it. One can only guess that the approved was also using an LLM. When I asked him why he did it, he was completely baffled and assured me he would never. Source control tells a different story.
* And I forgot to turn off LLM auto complete after setting up my new machine. The LLM wouldn't stop hallucinating non-existent constructors for non-existent classes. Bog standard intellisense did in seconds what I needed after turning off LLM auto complete.
LLMs sometimes save me some time. But overall I'm sitting at a pretty big amount of time wasted by them that the savings have not yet offset.
The first two cases indicate that you have some gaps in your change management process. Strict requirements for pulls and ci/cd checks.
> One developer tried to refactor a bunch of graph ql with an LLM and ended up checking in a bunch of completely broken code. Thankfully there were api tests.
So the LLM was not told how to run the tests? Without that they cannot know if what they did works, and they are a bit like humans, they try something and then they need to check if that does the right thing. Without a test cycle you definitely don’t get a lot out of LLMs.
You guys always find a way to say "you can be an LLM maximalist too, you just skipped a step."
The bigger story here is not that they forgot to tell the LLM to run tests, it's that agentic use has been so normalized and overhyped that an entire PR was attempted without any QA. Even if you're personally against this, this is how most people talk about agents online.
You don't always have the privilege of working on a project with tests, and rarely are they so thorough that they catch everything. Blindly trusting LLM output without QA or Review shouldn't be normalized.
Who is normalizing merging ANYTHING, LLM-generated or human-generated, without QA or review?
You should be reviewing everything that touches your codebase regardless of source.
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I am not saying you should be a LLM maximalist at all. I am just saying LLMs need to have a change-test cycle, like humans, in order to be effective. But looks like your goal is not really to be effective at using LLMs, but to bitch about it on the internet.
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