Programmer Humor

Not below average dev necessarily, but when posting code examples on the internet people often try to get a point across. Like how do I solve X? Here is code that solves X perfectly, the rest of the code is total crap, ignore that and focus on the X part. Because it's just an example, it doesn't really matter. But when it's used to train an LLM it's all just code. It doesn't know which parts are important and which aren't.

And this becomes worse when small little bits of code are included in things like tutorials. That means it's copy pasted all over the place, on forums, social media, stackoverflow etc. So it's weighted way more heavily. And the part where the tutorial said: "Warning, this code is really bad and insecure, it's just an example to show this one thing" gets lost in the shuffle.

Same thing when an often used pattern when using a framework gets replaced by new code where the framework does a little bit more so the same pattern isn't needed anymore. The LLM will just continue with the old pattern, even though there's often a good reason it got replaced (for example security issues). And if the new and old version aren't compatible with each other, you are in for a world of hurt trying to use an LLM.

And now with AI slop flooding all of these places where they used to get their data, it just becomes worse and worse.

These are just some of the issues why using an LLM for coding is probably a really bad idea.