Comment

Comment by torginus

In my experience (with ChatGPT 5.1 as of late) is that the AI follows a problem->solution internal logic and doesn't think and try to structure its code.

If you ask for an endpoint to a CRUD API, it'll make one. If you ask for 5, it'll repeat the same code 5 times and modify it for the use case.

A dev wouldn't do this, they would try to figure out the common parts of code, pull them out into helpers, and try to make as little duplicated code as possible.

I feel like the AI has a strong bias towards adding things, and not removing them. The most obviously wrong thing is with CSS - when I try to do some styling, it gets 90% of the way there, but there's almost always something that's not quite right.

Then I tell the AI to fix a style, since that div is getting clipped or not correctly centered etc.

It almost always keeps adding properties, and after 2-3 tries and an incredibly bloated style, I delete the thing and take a step back and think logically about how to properly lay this out with flexbox.

parent torginus 11 months ago

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton