People complain about LLMs not respecting KISS, but fail to address why = LLMs being defensive and coding for situations that either do not happen or are unlikely to happen. That doesn't absolve you from deciding using your human brain if given change makes sense or doesn't. You can also tell LLMs to not program defensively.

Same with any other acronyms - if you don't set up guardrails on when given principle should apply you'll get code that you can only complain about.

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layer8 an hour ago | parent [-]

> coding for situations that either do not happen or are unlikely to happen.

Not coding for situations that “do not happen” is exactly what creates vulnerabilities. But I also don’t think that such code is the main source of complexity in LLM-generated code.

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eithed 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

An example to what I'm talking about: I have application that takes two inputs from request. I've put in validation on request values to deny values that are greater than 100. In my code I'm adding these values. LLM can say "cater for addition of these two numbers, because they might go over MAX_INT and result in overflow". This is a situation that won't happen. LLM can recommend - add assertions. That's unnecessary.

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layer8 26 minutes ago | parent [-]

Arguably it’s only unnecessary when the value range is enforced by the programming language (types). The structure of who calls what in the code can change, and suddenly larger values can appear. You don’t want to have to perform whole-program analysis on every change to check whether all assumptions made in the past still hold. That’s also a source of vulnerabilities: assumptions that held when the code was written, but stopped holding sometime later.

That’s why I think code needs to document all its assumptions, and in a way that is checked by the compiler to the extent possible. If you document that the values have restricted range, then the AI should be taking it into account.

	▲	eithed 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Types is an option. Another option would be tests (and in this case mutation testing). My main point still stands = LLMs code defensively catering for unknowns that are not loaded into context.

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ShadowOfThePit 12 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I vibe-slopped a small and local forms application for my family. I explicitly mentioned that fact to the LLM.

Yet, I removed 2/3s of the code, because it triple-checked that every file really existed and was valid, that the input form was less than a million bytes in size, that there were propper HTTP status codes for everything, and that every possible error from reading data was eagerly checked and caught.

Like come on, a grand total of three people will ever look at it.