3 ms·

It's not a new phenomenon. Time was, people would copy-paste from blog posts with the same effect.

evilduck 10mo ago
I would bet in most organizations you can find a copy-pasted version of the top SO answer for email regex in their language of choice, and if you chase down the original commit author they couldn't explain how it works.
- 1-more 10mo ago
  I think it's impossible to actually write an email regex because addresses can have arbitrarily deeply nested escaping. I may have that wrong. I'd hope that regex would be .+@.+ and that's it (watch me get Cunninghammed because there is some valid address wherein those plusses should be stars).
  - notpachet 10mo ago
    TIL Cunningham's Law[0]. I knew about that phenomenon but not the proper name. Thanks! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#Law
lm28469 10mo ago
Always the same old tiring "this has always been possible before in some remotely similar fashion hence we should not criticise anything ever again" argument. You could intuitively think it's just a difference of degree, but it's more akin to a difference of kind. Same for a nuke vs a spear, both are weapons, no one argues they're similar enough that we can treat them the same way
- array_key_first 10mo ago
  Yes, I'm so over this argument. It can literally be made for anything, and it is! At the end of the day we're not performing war by poking other people with long sticks and we're not getting the word out by sending out a carrier pigeon. Methods and medium matters.
troyvit 10mo ago
I used to do that in simpler days. I'd add a link to where I copied it from so we could reference it if there were problems. This was for relatively small projects with just a few people.
- jennyholzer2 10mo ago
  > I'd add a link to where I copied it from LLMs can't do this. Your code is unambiguously better than any LLM code if you can comment a link to the stackoverflow post you copied it from.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 10mo ago
    > Your code is unambiguously better than any LLM code if you can comment a link to the stackoverflow post you copied it from. This is not a truism. "My" code might come from an LLM and that's fine if I can be reasonably confident it works. I might try to gain that confidence by testing the code and reading it to understand what it's doing. It is also true of blog post code, regardless of how I refer to the code; if I link to the blog post, it's because it does a better job of explaining than I ever could in code comments. Whether LLMs make one more productive is hard to measure but it seems to be missing the point to write this. The point is, including the code is a choice and one should be mindful of it, no matter the code's origin. At that point, this comes off like you just have something to prove; there doesn't seem to be a reason not to use the LLM code if you know it works and you know why it works.
    - wizzwizz4 10mo ago
      Believing you know how it works and why it works is not the same as that actually being the case. If the code has no author (in that it's been plagiarised by a statistical process that introduces errors), there's nowhere to go if you realise "oops, I didn't understand that as well as I had thought!".
      - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 10mo ago
bgwalter 10mo ago
I don't see the problem with fentanyl given that people have been using caffeine forever.
nunez 10mo ago
Yeah, but being able to produce nuclear-sized 10k+ LOC PRs to open-source projects in minutes with relatively-zero effort definitely is. At least you had to use your brain to know which blog posts/SO answers to copypasta from.

I would bet in most organizations you can find a copy-pasted version of the top SO answer for email regex in their language of choice, and if you chase down the original commit author they couldn't explain how it works.

1-more 10mo ago
I think it's impossible to actually write an email regex because addresses can have arbitrarily deeply nested escaping. I may have that wrong. I'd hope that regex would be .+@.+ and that's it (watch me get Cunninghammed because there is some valid address wherein those plusses should be stars).
- notpachet 10mo ago
  TIL Cunningham's Law[0]. I knew about that phenomenon but not the proper name. Thanks! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#Law

lm28469 10mo ago

Always the same old tiring "this has always been possible before in some remotely similar fashion hence we should not criticise anything ever again" argument. You could intuitively think it's just a difference of degree, but it's more akin to a difference of kind. Same for a nuke vs a spear, both are weapons, no one argues they're similar enough that we can treat them the same way

array_key_first 10mo ago
Yes, I'm so over this argument. It can literally be made for anything, and it is! At the end of the day we're not performing war by poking other people with long sticks and we're not getting the word out by sending out a carrier pigeon. Methods and medium matters.

troyvit 10mo ago

I used to do that in simpler days. I'd add a link to where I copied it from so we could reference it if there were problems. This was for relatively small projects with just a few people.

jennyholzer2 10mo ago
> I'd add a link to where I copied it from LLMs can't do this. Your code is unambiguously better than any LLM code if you can comment a link to the stackoverflow post you copied it from.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 10mo ago
  > Your code is unambiguously better than any LLM code if you can comment a link to the stackoverflow post you copied it from. This is not a truism. "My" code might come from an LLM and that's fine if I can be reasonably confident it works. I might try to gain that confidence by testing the code and reading it to understand what it's doing. It is also true of blog post code, regardless of how I refer to the code; if I link to the blog post, it's because it does a better job of explaining than I ever could in code comments. Whether LLMs make one more productive is hard to measure but it seems to be missing the point to write this. The point is, including the code is a choice and one should be mindful of it, no matter the code's origin. At that point, this comes off like you just have something to prove; there doesn't seem to be a reason not to use the LLM code if you know it works and you know why it works.
  - wizzwizz4 10mo ago
    Believing you know how it works and why it works is not the same as that actually being the case. If the code has no author (in that it's been plagiarised by a statistical process that introduces errors), there's nowhere to go if you realise "oops, I didn't understand that as well as I had thought!".
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 10mo ago

bgwalter 10mo ago

I don't see the problem with fentanyl given that people have been using caffeine forever.

nunez 10mo ago

Yeah, but being able to produce nuclear-sized 10k+ LOC PRs to open-source projects in minutes with relatively-zero effort definitely is. At least you had to use your brain to know which blog posts/SO answers to copypasta from.