Andy BuckleyFeb 20

Released #LHAPDF 6.5.6 today -- https://gitlab.com/hepcedar/lhapdf/-/releases/lhapdf-6.5.6

Since a colleague had a Claude Code sub, we asked them out of curiosity to get it to run a code review. This was actually pretty useful, and an indication of where #AI tools can help with stuff humans hate to do -- but using its solutions to help us think, _definitely_ not using its proposed solutions which would have definitely damaged quality and hidden (minor) issues.

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LHAPDF 6.5.6 · Cedar / LHAPDF · GitLab

Various bugfixes and improvements, including speed-ups in the grid-indexing hot loop (thanks to Alexander Puck Neuwirth), efficiency improvements in the Fortran evolvepdfm and lhapdf_xfxq2_stdpartons functions (thanks to Alexander...

GitLab
Show threadAndy BuckleyFeb 20

There were no "realistic" bugs, but a couple of theoretical array overflows were worth fixing. One would have been hard to find because there was a good reason in principle for an offset and the comments referenced that reason... but it didn't apply to the partial copy we were using. So it just looked either more closely or usefully more naively than a developer review would.

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Show threaddavidFeb 21
@[email protected]
Was there anything a static analyzer wouldn't have found, too?
Show threadAndy Buckley
@david Across the few packages we've tried so far, I don't think so. Apart from a few typo corrections in comments, which aren't their remit but also don't require anything particularly intelligent. The one thing is perhaps that it actually built the code and commented on the lack of warnings... but I know that, it's hardly an accident! So no, nothing new and revelatory, but a convenient packaging
Feb 21 at 5:14pmTusky
Show threaddavidFeb 22
@[email protected]
The usual convenience vs legal/ethical/environment trade-off, then? :)

I wish the actual costs and impact of running these "free" tools could be made clearer at the point of use. But that's of course an old debate, see carbon pricing