Comment by torginus
6 days ago
LLMs can produce bad code in ways no human ever would. I remember working on headscratcher problem of walking a tree while gradually building up state, and since LLMs are supposed to be good at algorithms, I asked Claude.
It came up with a correct LC-hard tier solution that involved dynamic programming, and was essentially an unreadable dense mess that was impossible to reason through as a human.
It worked, but it was so bad, that I sat down and realized after a bit that with maintaining a small cache, and being very particular about how the nodes are traversed, I reduced the solution to like a 10 line modified DFS, that I could understand.
I’ e written bad code and I’ve reviewed bad code by other humans. In both of those cases the code gets re-written. In the first the reviewer tells me the code is hard to understand, can it please refactor. In the 2nd I tell the person I’m reviewing the same thing, maybe with some suggestions.
I do the same with the LLM. I tell it that solution is convoluted and hard to understand, if I have a concrete suggestion I suggest one, otherwise I ask it for ideas. We get there just like I do with humans