To be brutally honest, blaming chat-gpt for a coding mistake doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.
Having insufficient testing and 0 monitoring does not improve it.
Y'all need to hire some senior backend Devs.
A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k
391–400 of 526 posts
Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could they have deleted it because of all the negativity? They did make a silly mistake, but we are humans, and humans, be it individually or collectively, do make silly mistakes.
If you code for a hobby/fun, yeah, sure, it's a silly mistake. If you're earning past six figures, are part of a team of programmers, call yourself an professional / engineer, and have technical management above you like a VP of Engineering, yadda yadda....then it's closer to systematic failure of the company's engineering practices than "mistake." There is a reason we call it software engineering , not software fuck…
This is how I felt when a Gitlab employee deleted the production database by doing it in the wrong terminal window.
Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k
#393No, ChatGPT made you the money that your app generated since you had no ability to implement it otherwise/without ChatGPT. Your inability to code, debug, log, monitor cost you the $10k. ChatGPT is net positive in this story.
Looking at this team's project at github.com/reworkd, it clearly tells the maturity of the product as well as the team. Emoji driven development. Emoji's for all commit messages. Monkeys, bananas, rockets, fireworks, you name it, they have it in their commit message.
Commit messages are overrated.
Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k
#394I spotted the error instantly. With all due respect to your team - this has nothing to do with ChatGPT and everything to do with using a programming model that your team does not have sufficient expertise in. Even if this error managed to slip by code review, it would have been caught with virtually any monitoring solution, many of which take less than 5 minutes to set up.
Interestingly, you know who else spotted the error? ChatGPT-4o. Annoyingly you can't share a chat with an image in it, but pasting in the image of the bad code, and prompting "whats wrong with the code" got ChatGPT to tell me that: * UUID Generation in Primary Key: The default parameter should use the callable uuid.uuid4 directly instead of str(uuid.uuid4()). SQLAlchemy will call the function to generate the value. *…
ChatGPT-4o might spot it when asking about the code directly, but this was a conversion from js to python, errors where chatgpt/copilot or any other AI will allucinate or make mistakes to be as close as the original code are very common in my experience.
The other common issue is if the original code has thinsg chatgpt doesn't like (misspell, slightly wrong formatting) it will fix it automatically, or if he really think you should have added a particular field you didn't add.
Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not some innocent mistake. The title is purposefully clickbait / keyword-y, implying that it was chatgpt that made the 'mistake' for SEO and to generate panicked clicks. "We made a programming error in our use of an LLM, didn't do any QA, and it cost us $10k" doesn't generate the C-suite "oh shit what if ChatGPT fucks up, what's our exposure!?" reaction. There's a million middle and upper management posting this…
> By definition they're not capable of "mistakes" because nothing they generate is remotely guaranteed to be correct or accurate. By that logic, nothing is capable of making mistakes :D. > Hilarious that a post which is insanely clickbait (which the rules say should result in a title rewrite) got boosted by the mods. You have a distorted view of what clickbait is and the rules of this site. I suggest you go calm down…
Why do you feel bound to defend this particular technology?
It is, after all, incapable of feeling hurt.
Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k
#396No, a lack of monitoring cost you $10K. Your app was throwing a database exception and nobody was alerted that this was not only happening, but happening continuously and in large volumes. Such an alert would have made this a 5-minute investigation rather than 5 days. If you haven't fixed that alerting deficiency, then you haven't really fixed anything.
Sure not having tests, is bad. Doing thing with AI without triple checking is dangerous.
But not having error logging/alerts on your db ? That's the crazy part.
This is a new product, is not legacy code from 20 years ago when they thought it was a neat idea to just throw stuff at the db raw, and check for db errors to do data validation, so alerts are hard because there's so many expected errrors.
Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k
#397The blog post is 404ing, here's a Web archive link https://web.archive.org/web/20240610032818/https://asim.bear... The author has added an important edit: > I want to preface this by saying yes the practices here are very bad and embarrassing (and we've since added robust unit/integration tests and alerting/logging), could/should have been avoided, were human errors beyond anything, and very obvious in hindsight. > >…
Seems like he changed the subdomain or something, the article is still up https://0912i390129ionkjan.bearblog.dev/how-a-single-chatgpt...
Also 404 now
Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k
#398I understand how the mistake was made, it seems relatively easy to slip by even when writing code without ChatGPT. But what I don't understand is how this wasn't caught after the first failure? Does this company not have any logging? Shouldn't the fact the backend is attempting to reuse UUIDs be immediately obvious from observing the error?
Five days to figure out this bug is pretty crazy ngl
it wasn't 5 days of only working on this one problem though, it was over 5 calendar days. even if something is gonna take me one day to implement, it's gonna take three days to get enough focus time between all the other meetings and fires to put out in order to actually get a day's worth of coding done
Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could they have deleted it because of all the negativity? They did make a silly mistake, but we are humans, and humans, be it individually or collectively, do make silly mistakes.
If you code for a hobby/fun, yeah, sure, it's a silly mistake. If you're earning past six figures, are part of a team of programmers, call yourself an professional / engineer, and have technical management above you like a VP of Engineering, yadda yadda....then it's closer to systematic failure of the company's engineering practices than "mistake." There is a reason we call it software engineering , not software fuck…
> If you're earning past six figures, are part of a team of programmers...
Compensation is in no way correlated with good engineering practices.
They might be paid much because they're developing something which people are willing to pay for, it doesn't have to be "real engineering".
Re: A ChatGPT mistake cost us $10k
#400Classic mistake. I tell newbies about this type of mistake roughly weekly hanging out on Discord. I bet it's in the training data of ChatGPT many many times.