If you did implement it yourself, you might have spotted a critical point that might simplify the whole thing...

This is the "Jodie Foster in Contact listening for the SETI signal with headphones" theory of how production software systems work.

dolni 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There have been multiple points in my career where I framed a problem as simple in my head, and it mostly was.

But then, one small detail changed everything. And it wasn't something I'd have thought of until I was writing the code.

I shudder thinking about the number of these issues hiding in LLM-generated code.

	▲	teiferer an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> hiding in LLM-generated code. There is a difference between LLM-generated code that somebody merged essentially unseen and LLM-generated code which a human then looked at carefully and massaged until they were happy with it. The first version can hide a lot of crap. All you see is the end-to-end functionality and there can be corner cases or scenarios which you have not tried and in which it is terrible or plain incorrect. The second version hides just as many issues as human written code. Unfortunately, the debate that our field has about LLM-generated code mixes both quite freely even though they are quite distinct.

And yet, continuing your analogy, she made an amazing discovery this way.

	▲	themgt 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Jodie Foster did make an amazing discovery that way in the movie Contact, that is true. "Why build one when you can have two at twice the price?" would be my engineering takeaway from that movie though.