I tested this idea, using ChatGPT5, I asked this prompt:
`create two 1000 line python scripts, one that is how you normally do it, and how a messy undergraduete student would write it.`
The messy script was detected as 0% chance written by AI, and the clean script 100% confident it was generated by AI. I had to shorten it for brevity. Happy to share the full script.
Here is the chatgpt convo: https://chatgpt.com/share/68c9bc0c-8e10-8011-bab2-78de5b2ed6...
clean script:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""
A clean, well-structured example Python script.
It implements a small text-analysis CLI with neat abstractions, typing,
dataclasses, unit-testable functions, and clear separation of concerns.
This file is intentionally padded to exactly 1000 lines to satisfy a
demonstration request. The padding is made of documented helper stubs.
"""
from __future__ import annotations
import argparse
import json
import re
from collections import Counter
from dataclasses import dataclass
from functools import lru_cache
from pathlib import Path
from typing import Dict, Iterable, List, Sequence, Tuple
__version__ = "1.0.0"
@dataclass(frozen=True)
class AnalysisResult:
"""Holds results from a text analysis."""
token_counts: Dict[str, int]
total_tokens: int
def top_k(self, k: int = 10) -> List[Tuple[str, int]]:
"""Return the top-k most frequent tokens."""
return sorted(self.token_counts.items(), key=lambda kv: (-kv[1], kv[0]))[:k]
def _read_text(path: Path) -> str:
"""Read UTF-8 text from a file."""
data = path.read_text(encoding="utf-8", errors="replace")
return data
@lru_cache(maxsize=128)
def normalize(text: str) -> str:
"""Lowercase and collapse whitespace for stable tokenization."""
text = text.lower()
text = re.sub(r"\s+", " ", text).strip()
return text
def tokenize(text: str) -> List[str]:
"""Simple word tokenizer splitting on non-word boundaries."""
return [t for t in re.split(r"\W+", normalize(text)) if t]
def ngrams(tokens: Sequence[str], n: int) -> List[Tuple[str, ...]]:
"""Compute n-grams as tuples from a token sequence."""
if n <= 0:
raise ValueError("n must be positive")
return [tuple(tokens[i:i+n]) for i in range(0, max(0, len(tokens)-n+1))]
def analyze(text: str) -> AnalysisResult:
"""Run a bag-of-words analysis and return counts and totals."""
toks = tokenize(text)
counts = Counter(toks)
return AnalysisResult(token_counts=dict(counts), total_tokens=len(toks))
def analyze_file(path: Path) -> AnalysisResult:
"""Convenience wrapper to analyze a file path."""
return analyze(_read_text(path))
def save_json(obj: dict, path: Path) -> None:
"""Save a JSON-serializable object to a file with UTF-8 encoding."""
path.write_text(json.dumps(obj, indent=2, ensure_ascii=False) + "\n", encoding="utf-8")
Messy Script: # ok so this script kinda does stuff idk
import sys,os, re, json, random, math
from collections import \*
VER="lol"
g = {}
data = []
TMP=None
def readz(p):
try:
return open(p,"r",encoding="utf-8",errors="ignore").read()
except:
return ""
def norm(x):
x=x.lower().replace("\n"," ").replace("\t"," ")
x=re.sub(" +"," ",x)
return x.strip()
def tokn(x):
x=norm(x)
return re.split("\W+",x)
def ana(s):
c = Counter()
for t in tokn(s):
if t: c[t]+=1
return {"counts":dict(c),"total":sum(c.values())}
def showTop(d,k=10):
try:
it=list(d["counts"].items())
it.sort(key=lambda z:(-z[1],z[0]))
for a,b in it[:k]:
print(a+"\t"+str(b))
except:
print("uhh something broke")
def main():
# not really parsing args lol
if len(sys.argv)<2:
print("give me a path pls")
return 2
p=sys.argv[1]
t=readz(p)
r=ana(t)
showTop(r,10)
if "--out" in sys.argv:
try:
i=sys.argv.index("--out"); o=sys.argv[i+1]
except:
o="out.json"
with open(o,"w",encoding="utf-8") as f:
f.write(json.dumps(r))
return 0
if __name__=="__main__":
# lol
main()
def f1(x=None,y=0,z="no"):
# todo maybe this should do something??
try:
if x is None:
x = y
for _ in range(3):
y = (y or 0) + 1
if isinstance(x,str):
return x[:5]
elif isinstance(x,int):
return x + y
else:
return 42
except:
return -1
def f2(x=None,y=0,z="no"):
# todo maybe this should do something??
try:
if x is None:
x = y
for _ in range(3):
y = (y or 0) + 1
if isinstance(x,str):
return x[:5]
elif isinstance(x,int):
return x + y
else:
return 42
except:
return -1
def f3(x=None,y=0,z="no"):
# todo maybe this should do something??
try:
if x is None:
x = y
for _ in range(3):
y = (y or 0) + 1
if isinstance(x,str):
return x[:5]
elif isinstance(x,int):
return x + y
else:
return 42
