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Comment by benhoyt

1 day ago

Not me personally, but a GitHub user wrote a replacement for Go's regexp library that was "up to 3-3000x+ faster than stdlib": https://github.com/coregx/coregex ... at first I was impressed, so started testing it and reporting bugs, but as soon as I ran my own benchmarks, it all fell apart (https://github.com/coregx/coregex/issues/29). After some mostly-bot updates, that issue was closed. But someone else opened a very similar one recently (https://github.com/coregx/coregex/issues/79) -- same deal, "actually, it's slower than the stdlib in my tests". Basically AI slop with poor tests, poor benchmarks, and way oversold. How he's positioning these projects is the problematic bit, I reckon, not the use of AI.

Same user did a similar thing by creating an AWK interpreter written in Go using LLMs: https://github.com/kolkov/uawk -- as the creator of (I think?) the only AWK interpreter written in Go (https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk), I was curious. It turns out that if there's only one item in the training data (GoAWK), AI likes to copy and paste freely from the original. But again, it's poorly tested and poorly benchmarked.

I just don't see how one can get quality like this, without being realistic about code review, testing, and benchmarking.

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benhoyt

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dragonwriter  19 hours ago

> up to 3-3000x+ faster than stdlib

Note that this is semantically exactly equivalent to "up to 3000x faster than stdlib" and doesn't actually claim any particular actual speedup since "up to" denotes an upper bound, not a lower bound or expected value. It’s standard misleading-but-not-technically-false marketing language to create a false impression because people tend to focus on the number and ignore the "up to".

  • Dylan16807  16 hours ago

    When you say "up to" about a list of data points, it's not just a bound. At least one has to reach that amount or it's a lie.

  • nkrisc  14 hours ago

    Saying “up to” means that bound is the maximum value of the data set. It may be far from the median value, but it is included (or you’re lying). With any other interpretation the phrase has no meaning whatsoever.

    • nkrisc  9 hours ago

      I will concede, proactively, that "up to" could refer to some maximum possible bound, even if the current set doesn't include a value at that bound, though I would argue that's likely deceptive wording. For example, you could say that each carton of of eggs on a pallet contains up to 12 eggs, because that's the maximum capacity of the carton, even if none of the actual cartons on this pallet actually have 12 eggs in them.