I promise this blog will have more than an engineer yelling at the clouds about LLM pain. I was actually working on a retrospective on X-Men Legends, or my experiences building an NES emulator in Rust. However slop PRs started hitting a codebase I maintain at work. And like any healthy individual I wish to commiserate about this with others on the internet.
I’d like to think I have some ability for introspection. Is it me that’s the problem? Am I just not with it anymore? It’s one thing to see the spam come in and go “man this sucks”. But it’s another thing to have to explain to misguided individuals why their behavior is destructive. This is my attempt at delving into the “why”. Why do these slop PRs bother me so much? Why do they feel like such a drain?
One huge issue is that LLMs do weird and stupid things differently than how humans do them.
If you’ve developed an eye for reading human-made changes, you’re not necessarily going to recognize new and surprising failure modes as easily. It’s literally harder than regular code review.
Humans with modern tooling, for example, rarely hallucinate field/class/method/object names because non-spicy autocomplete keeps them on the rails. LLMs seem much more willing to decide the menu bar is .menuBar and not .topMenu, probably because their training corpus is full of the former.
Exactly.
Another problem with LLMs is that they are actually useful in some tasks and they can generate very good quality code if you’re diligent enough developer. I also have built personal tools with them, but I don’t have the knowledge of the code the LLM has hallucinated which means that before I would push this code forward I will have to basically familiarise myself with the code in a way how a code review works.
The knowledge you gain from this is also different from that of actually writing and running the code yourself. I have seen people who use LLMs to write commit messages which is the last thing you should do. Commit messages are probably the only places were we can meaningfully store the knowledge gathered during development and the more I see LLM commits the more I lose hope.