Edwin Brady3d ago

Today, thanks to a former PhD student, I learned that LLMs are terrible at generating Whitespace code: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.09678

Also today, I was invited (and I am accepting) to join a group on redesigning our undergraduate curriculum, which includes discussions on our choice of first programming language.

I am not saying that these things are related. I just happen to be mentioning them both at once because I saw them both today. You get a lot of characters in one toot after all.

What?

Show threadgaytabase3d ago
@edwinb they're not great at other code either
Show threadSlightlyCyberpunk3d ago
@dysfun @edwinb I'm going to once again take this opportunity to rant about that time this motherfucker I work with spent *an entire day* trying to get the LLM to create a shell script to select one column from a bunch of delimited text files (maybe 50k lines in total), and I came in after he'd already started executing that program and wrote and executed my own script to do the same task before that slop was even 10% done!
Show threadFinn3d ago
@admin @dysfun @edwinb are you aware there's also a shell utility for this (cut)?
Show threadSlightlyCyberpunk

@finn @dysfun @edwinb Yeah, but cut alone isn't gonna do it when the files use multi-character delimiters and each field is a key/value pair...which is probably why the AI needed ten damn hours to get it done, because it's marginally more complex than what you can copy/paste off Stack Overflow lol

Two cuts and a pipe probably could have done it; I think I went with sed though lol

Mar 21 at 9:59pmWeb
Show threadFinn2d ago
@admin @dysfun @edwinb oh yeah that'll do it!