this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
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Now that AI has become the main tool used by developers to write code, even in open source environments, it will be how feds will slip in backdoors to applications because nobody is going to review the logic of 20000 lines written by AI in a single commit.

Unless projects completely ban use of AI and only allow small commits, this is going to be inevitable. I've been seeing so many applications merging AI slop to their code on github already.

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[–] invalidusernamelol@hexbear.net 19 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Just because syntax is correct and the code runs doesnt mean the application is good.

This is something that no one seems to get (at least no one who doesn't actually write code). Technically correct and actually correct are in two different universes.

I spent two months re-writing our entire codebase from scratch last year because it had built up ~5 years of tech debt and was using systems and APIs that are no longer supported. There were a few concepts worth keeping, but not a single file was allowed to survive until it was rewritten.

Now that Python's type hints are more mature, that was a big one. The old code was using either no hints or old hints, and if you've ever worked in a fully typed (as in literally every line including private code) codebase, it's hard to go back. AIs kinda suck at that though because the vast majority of Python code is unhinted.

[–] Snort_Owl@hexbear.net 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Mypy gives me a headache for some things but its invaluable. It kinda just makes me wish for a strictly typed python tbh. Its also one of those languages you can fuck yourself into a corner real badly if you don’t have some strict rules for it. One guy I worked with loved using language features for no actual good reason until the codebase was practically its own domain specific language the IDE just highlighted in bulk as “idk wtf this is”. It would take days to understand to make a change and all it was doing was running a regression model on a date and value lmao

Yeah, my entire codebase is ~50-75k lines and it runs most of the company. I have a sort of "DSL" that's more just a wrapper library for the APIs we need to use. Means I can implement the optimal way to do something and have the production code just be a function/method call. That's incredibly useful when you are writing design automations that need to be very clear to read and change as a project evolves.

I've had a couple juniors over the years, and even without AI it was amazing just how much code they'd write. Like a tool script that kind worked and is 2000+ lines, but after my review/rewrite it's more generalized with error handling and it's 300 lines.