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Comment by acedTrex

3 days ago

> How do you know this was a "slop" if you did not try it?

Because I have eyes and can look at the code for 2 seconds. It's not very difficult to check for the hallmarks of careless slop code.

If you can't tell in a few seconds then you can continue testing it out just like any actual project.

And what are those hallmarks in this case? There is no heuristic that is applicable for every programming language.

Unfortunately, ratatui requires a lot of verbose code that may be indistinguishable from LLM generated code: https://ratatui.rs/examples/apps/demo/

  • https://ratatui.rs/examples/apps/demo/ is pretty much the oldest untouched remnant of code from tui-rs days (pre-ratatui fork in Feb 2023).

    Ratatui itself has a lot of much nicer AI generated code in it since then ;)

    We've also done a bunch of things to help drive down some of the boilerplate (not all of it mind you - as it's a library, not a framework like other TUI libs)

  • Easiest one is ridiculous comments, always a dead ringer for an LLM.

    ESPECIALLY when its from a plan and comments '// STEP 2: ...'

    Like here in this posts repo https://github.com/huseyinbabal/taws/blob/2ce4e24797f7f32a52...

    This a dead ringer for LLM slop that someone didnt even care enough to go through and clean up.

    Edit: Just to keep it going, you ever seen a human write dependencies like this for a small toy tui? https://github.com/huseyinbabal/taws/blob/2ce4e24797f7f32a52...

    Edit2: Sure why not, lets reimplement randomly a custom jsonpath when serde_json_path exists https://github.com/huseyinbabal/taws/blob/2ce4e24797f7f32a52...

    • > Easiest one is ridiculous comments, always a dead ringer for an LLM.

      > ESPECIALLY when its from a plan and comments '// STEP 2: ...'

      There are people who actually program that way. The most extreme I know was Bogdan Iancu from OpenSIPS who I've seen create functions, write step-by-step comments for what they will do, then fill out the implementation.

      It's just a signal, not a certain thing.

    • That's not a smoking gun. I've definitely seen pre-2023 open source code mentioning steps in their comments. Even though that file also has a lot of tautological comments which are more indicative of LLM coding, it's not a smoking gun either: the frequency of comments is an editorial decision which has pros and cons.

      It's the equivalent of calling something an AI generated images just because the fingers are weird, and requires a judgment more concrete than "I have eyes."

      > you ever seen a human write dependencies like this for a small toy tui?

      Yes? That's just TOML syntax. I'm not sure which dependency in that list is excessive, especially for something that has to handle HTTP requests. If you mean adding a comment header for each section, then that's a better argument, but see argument above.

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