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A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

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101–110 of 526 posts

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#101
post #5

On one hand, thanks for being honest about a story of how this bug came to be. On the other hand, I don’t think advertising the fact that the company introduced a major bug from copy and pasting ChatGPT code around and that they spent a week being unable to even debug why it was failing. I don’t know much about this startup, but this blog post had the opposite effect of all of the other high quality post-mortem posts…

that blog post is all they have so not much to worry about company wise

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#102
post #5

On one hand, thanks for being honest about a story of how this bug came to be. On the other hand, I don’t think advertising the fact that the company introduced a major bug from copy and pasting ChatGPT code around and that they spent a week being unable to even debug why it was failing. I don’t know much about this startup, but this blog post had the opposite effect of all of the other high quality post-mortem posts…

This is a pretty common mistake with sqlalchemy whether you’re using ChatGPT or not. I learned the same lesson years ago, although I caught it while testing. I write plenty of python and I just don’t often pass functions in as parameters. In this case you need to! For something like this where you’re generating a unique id and probably need it in every model, it’s better to write a new Base model that includes things…

I wonder are there linters to detect those types of mistakes for SQLAlchemy. Even though I'm aware of such pitfalls, it's nice if linters can catch them cause I'm not confident to cache them all the time during code review.

Some linters like pyright can identify dangerous defaults in function call, like `def hello(x=[]): pass` (mutable values shouldn't be a default). Linter plugins for widely-used and critical libraries like SQLAlchemy are nice to have.

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#103
post #5

On one hand, thanks for being honest about a story of how this bug came to be. On the other hand, I don’t think advertising the fact that the company introduced a major bug from copy and pasting ChatGPT code around and that they spent a week being unable to even debug why it was failing. I don’t know much about this startup, but this blog post had the opposite effect of all of the other high quality post-mortem posts…

It read like no one really knew what they were doing. "We just let it generate the code and everything seemed to work" is certainly not a good way to market your company.

Eh I imagine they looked over the code as well, doing code review -- and at first glance, the code looks reasonable. I certainly wasn't able to catch the bug even though I tried to find it (and I was given a tiny collection of lines and the knowledge that there's a bug there!).

If anything, I think this says something about how dangerous ChatGPT and similar tools are: reading code is harder than writing code, and when you use ChatGPT, your role stops being that of a programmer and becomes that of a code reviewer. Worse, LLMs are excellent at producing plausible output (I mean that's literally all they do), which means the bugs will look like plausibly correct code as well.

I don't think this is indicative of people who don't know what they're doing. I think this is indicative of people using "AI" tools to help with programming at all.

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It read like no one really knew what they were doing. "We just let it generate the code and everything seemed to work" is certainly not a good way to market your company.

> It read like no one really knew what they were doing. "We just let [devs] generate the code and everything seemed to work" is certainly not a good way to [whatever]. Except, have you met startup devs? This is by and large the "move fast then unbreak things" approach.

This is why working for startups gives me PTSD. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#105

> Our project was originally full stack NextJS but we wanted to first migrate everything to Python/FastAPI This is the eye opener for me, how is a startup justifying a re-write when they don't even have customers?

And rewriting into a language that they lack experience in so much so that they can’t spot what are in my opinion really quite obvious bugs.

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#106
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It read like no one really knew what they were doing. "We just let [devs] generate the code and everything seemed to work" is certainly not a good way to [whatever]. Except, have you met startup devs? This is by and large the "move fast then unbreak things" approach.

This is why working for startups gives me PTSD. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

[deleted]

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#107
post #94
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that’s a bold claim, could you give an example?

Probably the most known example https://github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/19065 It is not an issue if you host in Vercel. Implementing the requested feature would make the framework much better and easier to use when self-hosted elsewhere. But there is neglection to resolve the issue. This is just one case.

FWIW, we host on Cloudflare and use their API to resize images on the fly and we're fine. Not so much a "lock-in" if other vendors can fill-in, is it?

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#108
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply put - if you want get the best out of the framework, you need to host it in Vercel. Otherwise, there are better options for frameworks. No need to ”fight it”. You will find many issues from GitHub which are not considered because they would make the framework ”better” or easier to use on other clouds.

Making things worse in a free offering by a company to profit from premium offerings by the same company its the pinacle of capitalism, reminds me of a recurrent joke I have with a friend while playing Call Of Duty, that they will get greedier and soon will sell not only character's skins but also shaders/textures for the maps, oh so you want to see something better than placeholder textures? We have the DLC just for…

More likely outcome: ads on static textures and between lobbies, oh but you can pay to turn them into _theme of the week_.

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#109
post #5

On one hand, thanks for being honest about a story of how this bug came to be. On the other hand, I don’t think advertising the fact that the company introduced a major bug from copy and pasting ChatGPT code around and that they spent a week being unable to even debug why it was failing. I don’t know much about this startup, but this blog post had the opposite effect of all of the other high quality post-mortem posts…

It read like no one really knew what they were doing. "We just let it generate the code and everything seemed to work" is certainly not a good way to market your company.

> It read like no one really knew what they were doing.

In my experience, hardly anyone in software does know what they're doing, for sufficiently rigorous values of "know what you're doing." We all read about other people's stupid mistakes, and think "haha, I would never have done that, because I know about XYZ!" And then we go off and happily make some equally stupid mistake because we don't know about ABC.

Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k

#110
It seems YC is trending younger with this AI wave (I believe average age of the most recent batch was ~26) - kids dropping out of college to build startups without ever having worked at a real software engineering job... I imagine this type of story is not at all uncommon at the moment.
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