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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 19, 2026, 7:23 PM

    Something that is extremely awesome about LLM code is its propensity to make endless fallback chains to rescue its fragmented and unreliable logic. The LLM in each pass wants the current thing to succeed, and will rig up hacks that give it trivial test passes. This has the wonderful byproduct of making things fail in the wrong direction in surprising cases - failure is not a smooth outcome, you can't just fail something once and conclude the route is blocked off. you have to fuzz and fail everything in all the different ways, because for some reason one of those failures will engage an entirely different mechanism that rolls over weirdly. This is aided by being given the client source with revealing LLM comments, and having access to the server binary on a system rich with tokens and time for brute force disassembly

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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 19, 2026, 8:05 PM

    LLM code constantly dares to ask the question "how hard could you make it to have a constant." In this case, "how on earth can we set the page title to "Muse""

    export const LOGGED_OUT_PRODUCT_NAME = "Muse"; export const LOGGED_IN_PRODUCT_NAME = "Muse"; const LEGACY_PRODUCT_FULL_NAME = "Project Hatch"; const LEGACY_PRODUCT_SHORT_NAME_PATTERN = /\bHatch\b/g; export type ProductBrandNames = { readonly fullName: string; readonly shortName: string; }; function createProductBrand(productName: string) { return { fullName: productName, shortName: productName, shortNameLowercase: productName.toLowerCase(), assistantFallbackName: productName, } as const; } export const LOGGED_OUT_PRODUCT_BRAND = createProductBrand( LOGGED_OUT_PRODUCT_NAME, ); export const LOGGED_IN_PRODUCT_BRAND = createProductBrand( LOGGED_IN_PRODUCT_NAME, ); /** Existing signed-in surfaces use this authenticated-product alias. */ export const PRODUCT_BRAND = LOGGED_IN_PRODUCT_BRAND;
    import { LOGGED_IN_PRODUCT_BRAND } from "@/_lib/productBranding"; /** Browser-only product name revealed after the NDA has been accepted. */ export const POST_NDA_BROWSER_TITLE = LOGGED_IN_PRODUCT_BRAND.fullName; /** The product mark that goes with {@link POST_NDA_BROWSER_TITLE}. */ export const POST_NDA_FAVICON_SVG_URL = "/images/favicon/app-squiggle.svg";
    return () => { unsub_0(); document.removeEventListener("visibilitychange", onReturnToTab); window.removeEventListener("focus", onReturnToTab); closePendingApprovalBrowserNotification(); document.title = POST_NDA_BROWSER_TITLE; setFaviconBadge(false); }; }, []);
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  • Olafmrkaiser@mastodon.social
    Oct 19, 2026, 8:12 PM

    @jonny I dunno, Jonny. Reading LLM code makes me feel as if I had a stroke. This here is no exception :toot:

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  • Omnivorous Narratoromnivorous_narrator@mastodon.social
    Oct 19, 2026, 8:16 PM

    @jonny more generally - a lot LLM code is so inconsistent re. level of abstraction, almost hilariously so. “hacks held together by duct tape” mashed together with “enterprise Java Beans”

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  • RojCowlesRojCowles@techhub.social
    Oct 20, 2026, 12:49 PM

    @jonny

    Ooof!

    Urban legend at a company I worked at was that years ago a well meaning developer added a nullptr check to fix a rare crash case in one of the applications.

    Turns out the crash was all that stood in the way of another undiscovered bug that effectively did rm -rf /* when triggered.

    To say that customers were unamused might be a charming understatement.

    The thought that these lash ups of nested LLMs and under the covers shell commands, AKA coding assistants, can be generating so many statistically probable code changes in production systems that they are un-reviewable by competent developers is frankly terrifying.

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