Comment by ModernMech

Comment by ModernMech 11 hours ago

One has to wonder, why would there be any bugs at all if the LLM could fix them? Given Kernighan's Law, does this mean the LLM can't debug the bugs it makes?

My feeling is unless you are using a formal language, then you're expressing an ambiguous program, and that makes it inherently buggy. How does the LLM infer your intended meaning otherwise? That means programmers will always be part of the loop, unless you're fine just letting the LLM guess.

  Kernighan's Law - Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.

energy123 10 hours ago

The same applies to humans, who are capable of fixing bugs and yet still produce bugs. It's easier to detect bugs with tests and fix them than to never have introduced bugs.

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ModernMech 9 hours ago

But the whole idea of Kernighan’s law is to not be so clever that no one is available to debug your code.
So what happens when an LLM writes code that is too clever for it to debug? If it weren’t too clever to debug it, it would have recognized the bug and fixed it itself.
Do we then turn to the cleverest human coder? What if they can’t debug it, because we have atrophied human debugging ability by removing them from the loop?

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