One can argue that these products are the flagship products of their respective AI companies aside from the AI models themselves of course.
I imagine that this story will be picked up by the news left and right, some stories just feel this way and this one is like that (given 12 upvotes on HN in 7 minutes)
The only logical conclusion (from this incident) that I can have is: An (vibe-coded?) product is hard to maintain even for some of the best engineers and is bound to have severe bugs.
2. Proper testing and taking issues seriously is the key if you still wish to do this and there isn't much. This is a week old issue which I can only classify as severe.
I wish to keep an nuanced opinion about it but oh this is bad for openAI (not as bad as them accepting autonomous AI within drones and mass surveillance though)
My point is: AI has both uphills and downward valleys and cliffs. It might as well just accelerate you, which could be, towards your downfall as well. Its recommended to keep an eye while driving and not drive too fast.
AI companies might be like car companies which don't offer a brake pedal.
Because it was deemed not Hard Enough task for real engineer to look at, so AI was sent to do it with no supervision, just checking the effects.
Also overly excessive logging is probably useful to them in chasing some of the edge cases, the cost to users doesn't matter in the slightest to them
because they trust the AI too much (and seem to be fin with acting knowingly negligent)
the problem is
- AI tends to produces very convincing looking code, even if fully wrong
- AI does mistakes of kinds no human would do, at least no human who is also able to write convincing looking code
- code reviews are hard, a lot of devs, including senior devs, put a lot of implicit trust into the co-worker behaving "sane and non malicious". But AIs behave sometimes not so sane and in a way (wrt. trying to be convincing). In the worst case in ways which if it where a human you might consider to be them trying malicious sabotage the product
Like a "dump" example from work:
- AI randomly removes a HTML element id while doing other changes in jsx/react
- the PR has a lot of changes, the id removal line looks innocent, like some on the fly cleanup
- human reviewers have the bad tendency to often not look too much at deleted lines, only if they need reference to how a new line was before (but it's only a deleted line and no new line)
- you don't expect humans to randomly without reason delete important properties of components when changing other things
- you maybe would still have found it, but it's a emergency fix for a production issue
- it happens to miss integration tests, but happens to still matter a lot for one specific important for complicated reasons not properly tested flow (similar people tend to not test logging too much, at best the presence of needed info but hardly ever the absence of noise)
(*for them)
THE SPINNER MESSAGE CAUSES 100% GPU USAGE ON AN MBP M5!!
So any time you're waiting on the model (which is 90% of the time), your fans will be blasting (careful, don't use it on battery).
The issue is on github and close to 6 months old. Probably since the release of vibe coded junk. I would literally fix it myself but it's closed source for whatever reason.
There are many discussions about which model is better, or if vibe coding is even possible. I point you to the extent of what one of the most well funded, money flush, well staffed model making companies can do with vibe coding.
To me a screwup this bad (where the CEO has already made it clear they're now "focussing on coding") indicates that there's something truly broken in the company. No one on polymarket expects them to have a leading model any time soon for example.
It's a tragedy. The world needs competition to anthropic.
It's fascinating how offensive some of this verbiage becomes to you when you see it attached to LLM output too much.
Perhaps the framing shouldn't be "haha slop" but rather why doesn't the AI write better quality software than we do? To which the answer is obvious IMO -- even emergent properties can't elevate AI intelligence too far above the training dataset. So how do we get to superintelligent (or at least "not-wreck-your-NVMe-endurance-telligent") AI, if we, as a whole, are not smart enough ourselves?
Judge not the slop-bot, lest ye be judged yourself, engineer.
2. "One developer somewhere in the world made a bad mistake one time, so this represents the quality of all software devs everywhere". Maybe they were just a bad developer? Bad developers exist. I have never written a bug that has destroyed my users' hardware, and I think that writing such a bug is completely inexcusable in an enterprise environment with software that will be shipped to millions of users, as Codex is.
Probably whoever (human or agent) originally decided to put TRACE logs into SQLite also thought---or reasoned---so. Maybe the decision was right at that time but the amount of TRACE logs have increased enormously. You will never know.
sqlite3 ~/.codex/logs_2.sqlite "CREATE TRIGGER IF NOT EXISTS block_log_inserts BEFORE INSERT ON logs BEGIN SELECT RAISE(IGNORE); END;"
Also, I found that running VACUUM FULL on the sqlite file on my laptop shrunk it from 27GB to a mere 73MB[2].
Even with tests, the more complex the code base is, the more risky it is to vibe-code on it without introducing more bugs [0] and increasing the debt. Does not matter if the CI is green or if all the tests pass.
It gets even worse if you can't explain the change / pull request or what the implications are after applying that "suggested" fix.
[0] https://sketch.dev/blog/our-first-outage-from-llm-written-co...
Great! So next time the human will prompt the agent to watch out for and avoid this bug.
consp•1h ago
charcircuit•1h ago