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> ensure to handle the edge case where the client is running AIX 6 Regardless if the source was AI or not, this should just be a comment in the code, shouldn’t

• mrweasel 1y ago
  It should, but I think most of us read enough old code to know that this doesn't happen as often as we'd like. With an LLM you already wrote the prompt, so if you had an easy way to attach the prompt to the code it could make it more likely that some form of documentation exists. Some times you also fail to write the comment because at the time everyone knew why you did it like that, because that's what everyone did. Now it's 10 years later and everyone doesn't know that. The LLM prompt could still require you to type out the edge case that everyone in your line of business knows about, but might not a generalised across the entirety of the software industry.
  • mplanchard 1y ago
    I'm always a fan of more historical context on code, so maybe it'd be an okay fallback for a proper comment and git blame, but you'd have to find a way to separate the meaningful part of the prompt from the preamble that is implicitly inserted into most prompts ("you are a helpful assistant, only output code, no formatting markers, etc etc"). That said, I suspect it wouldn't actually be that useful for the "why" very often, which is usually what's lacking in these cases. I would guess that far more people prompt the LLMs with the "how," e.g. "write a function that takes these things as input and produces this output," which of course we can just read in the code.
• aledalgrande 1y ago
  Or a good commit/PR description?