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Linus Torvalds shares his thoughts on Anti-AI coding rules (thelemmy.club)
submitted 9 hours ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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[–] 3 points 6 hours ago (9 children)

Indeed, my code has never been more rich in unit tests now that coding assistants make them so easy to add. If the coding assistant subsequently does something weird that changes program behaviour it knows immediately.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 hours ago

    Indeed, my code has never been more rich in unit tests now that coding assistants make them so easy to add

    Me as well. A year ago there was significant trouble with those unit tests not adding much value but that has improved a lot over the past several model updates. The unit tests aren't 100% as good as they could or even should be (neither are human generated unit tests that take 10x as long to add) - but in terms of time invested vs value derived, they're excellent value for effort.

    If the coding assistant subsequently does something weird that changes program behaviour it knows immediately.

    About 90% of the time for me now, in Opus 5.5.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 hours ago (7 children)

    What do the tests do?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 hours ago (6 children)

    They check to make sure that the code continues producing the expected results. For example if I had some code that added up numbers, I might have a unit test that calls that function with the parameters "2" and "2" and checks to make sure the result is "4". If something changes that makes it start returning something else then a flag is immediately raised.

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  • [–] -1 points 5 hours ago (5 children)

    Are these tests written by AI? Have you reviewed the tests? Do they cover all code paths and all the possible inputs and outputs? Do the tests have requirements cited (traceability)?

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  • [–] 2 points 4 hours ago* (4 children)

    Unit tests have been around for a long time. They tended to be under-utilized in the past because they're such a maintenance headache - changes / improvements in the production code that used to be a simple 5 minute thing can easily balloon to an hour or more of headache in necessary adjustments to perfectly good unit tests for "the old way" that happened to be impacted by the change.

    Unit tests are a good way of keeping under-experienced programmers from accidentally breaking old things as they work on new things. They are VERY appropriate tools for LLM agent assisted development.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 hours ago (3 children)

    Absolutely not. In a world where hallucinating machines are writing code, humans should be writing the tests at a bare minimum.

    AI writing code to pass tests written by AI will get people killed.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

    Boeing managed to kill plenty of people without a single bit of help from AI / LLMs in their MAX 10 software.

    Used properly, LLMs could have articulated why their approach would lead to multiple crashes.

    Used improperly, any tool is dangerous, from a chainsaw to a plastic spoon, the potential for injuries and deaths are unlimited.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 hours ago (1 child)

    The max issue on the Boeing planes wasn't a software issue in that sense. The software actually worked as intended. Boeing just hid the fact that the software existed and made it purposefully hard to override, giving pilots quite the surprise when the plane didn't operate the way they expected, especially when the angle of attack sensor wasn't working.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 hours ago*

    There are all kinds of aspects to software development. Under-training pilots and then having software lead them to crash a plane full of passengers counts as a software development fail in my book. Also a marketing fail, a management fail, a quality systems fail, probably a regulatory oversight fail... it's up there with ignoring the guy telling the Space Shuttle mission control not to launch when it has been under 32F the night before, which wasn't a software fail at all, but was a broad cultural failure. Boeing's MAX-10 situation just happened to have software in the crux of the matter.

    I do software development. When I see something, I say something. I'm frequently ignored. Several times over the years, I've had the people that ignored me come back asking for help fixing the issue, after they realized that it was more important than they thought it was when they initially ignored me. Luckily, none of the people who died in those situations died (or were harmed in any significant way) because of the problem, but people dying "near the problem" brought the seriousness of it to a level where it finally got addressed.

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