To really foul things up you need an AI

Today, an AI review tool used by my workplace reviewed some code that I wrote, and incorrectly claimed that it would introduce a bug because a global variable I created could “be available to multiple browser tabs” (that’s not how browser JavaScript works).

Just in case I was mistaken, I explained to the AI why I thought it was wrong, and asked it to explain itself.

To do so, the LLM wrote a PR to propose adding some code to use our application’s save mechanism to pass the data back, via the server, and to any other browser tab, thereby creating the problem that it claimed existed.

This isn’t even the most-efficient way to create this problem. localStorage would have been better.

So in other words, today I watched an AI:
(a) claim to have discovered a problem (that doesn’t exist),
(b) when challenged, attempt to create the problem (that wasn’t needed), and
(c) do so in a way that was suboptimal.

Humans aren’t perfect. A human could easily make one of these mistakes. Under some circumstances, a human might even have made two of these mistakes. But to make all three? That took an AI.

What’s the old saying? “To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.”