That’s the fault of the human who used the LLM to write the code and didn’t test it properly.

aurareturn • last Friday at 9:06 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

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Exhaustive testing is hard, to be fair, especially if you don’t actually understand the code you’re writing. Tools like TLA+ and static analyzers exist precisely for this reason.

An example I use to talk about hidden edge cases:

Imagine we have this (pseudo)code

  fn doSomething(num : int) {
    if num % 2 == 0 {
      return  Math.sqrt(num)
    } else {
       return Math.pow(num, 2)
    }

  }

Someone might see this function, and unit test it based on the if statement like:

    assert(doSomething(4) == 2)
    assert(doSomething(3) == 9)

These tests pass, it’s merged.

Except there’s a bug in this; what if you pass in a negative even number?

Depending on the language, you will either get an exception or maybe a complex answer (which not usually something you want). The solution in this particular case would be to add a conditional, or more simply just make the type an unsigned integer.

Obviously this is just a dumb example, and most people here could pick this up pretty quick, but my point is that sometimes bugs can hide even when you do (what feels like) thorough testing.

alt Hacker News

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