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   Gabriele Svelto (gabrielesvelto@mas.to)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 04:08:02 JST Gabriele Svelto

   I've seen people claiming - with a straight face - that mechanical refactoring is a good use-case for LLM-based tools. Well, sed was developed in 1974 and - according to Wikipedia - first shipped in UNIX version 7 in 1979. On modern machines it can process files at speeds of several GB/s and will not randomly introduce errors while processing them. It doesn't cost billions, a subscription or internet access. It's there on your machine, fully documented. What are we even talking about?

   • Christine Lemmer-Webber repeated this.
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     Gabriele Svelto (gabrielesvelto@mas.to)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 04:08:02 JST Gabriele Svelto

     in reply to

     I think there's an important clarification to be made about LLM usage in coding tasks: do you trust the training data? Not your inputs, those are irrelevant, I mean the junk that the major vendors have dredged from the internet. Because I'm 100% positive that any self-respecting state-sponsored actor is poisoning training data as we speak by... simply publishing stuff on the internet.