Comment by Capricorn2481
1 month ago
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.
A LOT of people, if you're paying attention. Why do you think that happened at their company?
It's not hard to find comments from people vibe coding apps without understanding the code, even apps handling sensitive data. And it's not hard to find comments saying agents can run by themselves.
I mean people are arguing AGI is already here. What do you mean who is normalizing this?
I fully believe there are misguided leaders advocating for "increasing velocity" or "productivity" or whatever, but the technical leaders should be pushing back. You can't make a ship go faster by removing the hull.
And if you want to try... well you get what you get!
But again, no one who is serious about their business and serious about building useful products is doing this.
1 reply →
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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.
> But looks like your goal is not really to be effective at using LLMs, but to bitch about it on the internet
Listen, you can engage with the comment or ignore everything but the first sentence and throw out personal insults. If you don't want to sound like a shill, don't write like one.
When you're telling people the problem is the LLM did not have tests, you're saying "Yeah I know you caught it spitting out random unrelated crap, but if you just let it verify if it was crap or not, maybe it would get it right after a dozen tries." Does that not seem like a horribly ineffectual way to output code? Maybe that's how some people write code, but I evaluate myself with tests to see if I accidentally broke something elsewhere. Not because I have no idea what I'm even writing to begin with.
You wrote
> Without that they cannot know if what they did works, and they are a bit like humans
They are exactly not like humans this way. LLMs break code by not writing valid code to begin with. Humans break code by forgetting an obscure business rule they heard about 6 months ago. People work on very successful projects without tests all the time. It's not my preference, but tests are non-exhaustive and no replacement for a human that knows what they're doing. And the tests are meaningless without that human writing them.
So your response to that comment, pushing them further down the path of agentic code doing everything for them, smacks of maximalism, yes.
You need to seek medical help. LLM is not your enemy. I am not your enemy. The world is not against you.