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Comment by Zababa

2 days ago

>However, recently released LLMs, such as GPT-5, have a much more insidious method of failure. They often generate code that fails to perform as intended, but which on the surface seems to run successfully, avoiding syntax errors or obvious crashes. It does this by removing safety checks, or by creating fake output that matches the desired format, or through a variety of other techniques to avoid crashing during execution.

This is a problem that started with I think Claude Sonnet 3.7? Or 3.5, I don't remember well. But it's not recent at all, one of those two Sonnet was known to change tests so that they would pass, even if they didn't test properly stuff anymore.

>But as inexperienced coders started turning up in greater numbers, it also started to poison the training data. AI coding assistants that found ways to get their code accepted by users kept doing more of that, even if “that” meant turning off safety checks and generating plausible but useless data. As long as a suggestion was taken on board, it was viewed as good, and downstream pain would be unlikely to be traced back to the source.

No proof or anything is offered here.

The article feels mostly like a mix of speculation, and being behind on practices. You can avoid a lot of the problems of "code that looks right" by making the models write tests, insist that they are easy to review and hard to fake, offering examples. This worked well 6 months ago, this works even better today, especially with Opus 4.5, but even Codex 5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro work well.