alt Hacker NewsI think this is precisely why I don't mind it that much. I can't audit a huge codebase like a JavaScript runtime, whether the code is by a human from scratch or not. I just have to trust it as a black box.
I've seen LLMs produce terrible code indeed, but I have also seen humans produce terrible code. I haven't dug in to JS runtimes specifically but have read plenty of code in openjdk and cpython - there are many points that could be done better, but there's also no point since it's working, and keeping working code unchanged tends to be a smart decision in software engineering.
So of course the last point brings up whether it was a good idea to rewrite bun if it was working. Apparently the bun team thought the difficulty in getting changes in zig upstream meant it is. I don't intend to hold LLM code to a higher bar than human code - notably if the runtime continues to work, that is as good as I can expect from what is otherwise a huge black box of extreme programming (not that agile kind).
The difference is you can evaluate a small bit of the output of a human or a team of humans and expect all their other code to be roughly in the same ballpark of quality.
An LLM can’t be trusted to produce code and make higher level project structure choices of the same quality at all times, because it can’t be trusted at all - trust is for deterministic systems. But still it begs us to trust it. Every prompt that yields good results sets us up to expect good results, so we get lazy - and then the next prompt it spews out garbage.