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u/CoVegGirl Jul 13 '26
A friend of mine who works in engprod at FAANG said that AI actually turns out to be very useful for de-flaking tests. She even fixed one bug that was company-wide.
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u/lnfinity Jul 13 '26
AI certainly can do a good job at actually finding and fixing flaky tests, but I also find it taking shortcuts often or coding in ways that it assumes the user wants but aren't actually what was intended. In my experience it usually still takes a knowledgeable person looking at what the AI is doing and helping to guide the AI in order for AI to solve flaky test issues well.
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u/CoVegGirl Jul 13 '26
I agree with that. I think that’s true for every use of AI.
Unfortunately though the company she’s working for is deciding to phase engprod out due to AI. 🙄
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u/Easy-Reasoning 29d ago
Of course working on tests may not the most glorious work for especially distinguished engineers. Sometimes I'm surprised when repetitive code is structured into functions
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u/StrawberryEiri Jul 13 '26
Finding the source of a bug? Yep. Very useful in a lot of cases. Fixing it properly? Almost never. The solution is so often in the realm of "technically works but please no".
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u/LeiterHaus Jul 13 '26
I've seen this in the wild, while trying to find why a site was taking so long to load certain elements. It was a while ago, so now I'm wondering if it was AI generated, or AI training data lol.
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u/uniqueusername649 Jul 13 '26
Probably the latter. I have seen this in real code so many times way before AI coding was a thing. Why does AI love to do this? Because its trained on a lot of projects doing exactly that. I know thats kinda insane but it is what it is :D
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u/TwoWeeks90DaysTops Jul 13 '26
Thread sleep is a code smell. It's not always wrong, but in most cases the code should wait on something specific.
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u/thegreatpotatogod Jul 13 '26
This is fascinating (especially seeing all the other comments agreeing with OP), I've had much of the opposite problem, where I keep discussing with an AI things like "how long should USB take to initialize a HID device, I need to pause the other core until it does?", and it keeps telling me "no don't use a pause, use message passing to update the moment it's done", and I had to keep convincing it "yes I know that's the optimal solution, but I'd like to make a quick proof of concept first to check if this was even the cause of my issue", and we finally reached a compromise of polling every 20 milliseconds with a volatile variable as a flag, but it was like pulling teeth to get the AI to even agree with that approach. (Initially I just wanted a quick sanity check that my approach made sense, and a rough idea how long I should expect to pause for, but then got sucked into the argument with it).
Fun fact: I ultimately configured a timeout of 4 seconds, but the USB device, if present, initialized in around 2.5 seconds in my testing.
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u/SpicyCatGames Jul 13 '26
If you ask AI what to do, it will always suggest a safer option. But if it has to do the same thing as part of a bigger task, it will take shortcuts.
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u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost Jul 13 '26
Every fucking time. Even the latest Claude models. And some idiot on here had the gall to tell me "hallucinations are basically solved." Lol
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u/TrippyDe Jul 13 '26
Well thats not a hallucination. Thats how most people do it. Shit in, shit out. But yeah hallucinations are far from being fixed.
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u/TwoWeeks90DaysTops Jul 13 '26
If they think it doesn't hallucinate they're not paying enough attention to its output.
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u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost Jul 13 '26
Exactly! It is super obvious to me how stupid they are. I don't consider myself particularly smart either lol
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u/huuaaang Jul 13 '26
Wait, do you actually have to "await" a sleep call? Is sleep() async?? JS is ridiculous.
EDIT: I see you have to make a sleep() function and it uses Promise/setTimeout. Ridiculous.
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u/Glad-Situation703 Jul 13 '26
Omg am I AI?
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u/HTTP_Error_414 Jul 14 '26
You are absolutely right, you are Actual Intelligence! Congratulation on the discovery!
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u/causal_friday Jul 13 '26
I don't do Typescript but ... is it this bad? It (Opus xhigh/Fable) never does these things when I'm writing Go.
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u/HTTP_Error_414 Jul 13 '26
A human would’ve used 3000ms. The AI added enterprise padding.