Re:Various LLM Smells
by galangalalgol on Friday May 29, 2026 @08:39PM
(#48331159)
Being faster than humans at mundane and verifiable tasks is a useful thing. Great for format conversions. Api mappings etc. if you don't understand the algorithm you are asking it to implement, you better at least understand how to generate a large set of correct input and output pairs yourself, because it will absolutely make stuff up and adjust the test cases to pass.
The 'camp 1' people in the pre-LLM days were probably the ones that often just copy+pasted code from SO they didn't really understand, but since the code seemed to work when they ran it, they thought it was all fine and continued on.
Whereas the 'camp 2' people when trying to find an answer to something, discarded 99% of SO and other similar answers, having the knowledge to see how they had broken edge cases, were limited in some way, didn't actually solve the underlying problem, etc.
Nowadays, 'camp 1' people just use the LLM output and it "seems to work" and consider it all fine. Whereas the 'camp 2' people still continuously see all the faults with it.