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SwellJoeyesterday at 8:20 PM0 repliesview on HN

I was using Copilot Code Review pretty religiously for a while, as I get access for free (the $10 plan) due to my Open Source work, but it recently introduced a monster of a misfeature that caused a massive increase in complexity over time, while I wasn't paying close enough attention to it. Every subsequent model saw that change and the explanation for it in the changelog and assumed it was policy rather than a model being brain-damaged, so it became a fractal of fuckery I had to untangle with a good model and some close human supervision. It was an administrative tool that directly edits configuration files for a service. Copilot code review decided it needed to be an overlay service that applied only the configuration created by our config UI, fully independent of the system service. And, subsequent "bugs" that other LLMs "fixed" were just applying more and more bandaids to that bad decision (attaching the services together so restarting one would restart the other after, etc., making sure there were no conflicts across the files, warnings when one rule conflicted with another, etc.). Because modifying an additional service is simply not what the tool was designed for, it seemed to be really buggy, so there were lots of "fixes". It took me too long to realize the fundamental failure point.

That's my way of saying, I am hesitant to trust a stupid model to do code review because I become complacent and when it suggests a small change that seems reasonable (the LLMs are very good at sounding reasonable, far better at sounding reasonable than being reasonable, in fact), I might not notice that it just did a stupid until much later, when it becomes a big pile of stupids.

My fault for trusting it, of course. But, my eyes glaze over when I read AI prose, whether it's code review or anything else. It's hard to catch one incorrect behavior in a batch of several reasonable suggestions.