escaping bugs in llm-generated code are weirdly hard to catch on review because the logic looks fine - it's the edge cases that are off. had a similar (much less dramatic) thing with a cleanup script that worked fine on ci but went sideways on a dev machine with spaces in the path. nothing wiped but it was close enough that i started testing path handling separately.

the tricky part is the model isn't really "wrong" in any obvious sense. works on most inputs. it just doesn't know what your actual directory structure looks like.

the scheduling is the tell. 17 commands every 30 min isn't analytics or crash reporting - that's systematic fingerprinting with a consistent cadence.

what's frustrating is this is basically invisible without running in a monitored environment. static analysis won't surface it. you'd need behavioral monitoring - network traffic plus syscall tracing - to even know it's happening.

seen similar patterns in CI/CD tooling actually. less blatant but same mechanism - process phoning home way more often than you'd expect, commands that look like routine system auditing. most devs assume third-party tools behave themselves.

mostly for the boring stuff - layout scaffolding, new component boilerplate, converting figma specs. works well enough there.

falls apart with anything stateful or that requires understanding the rest of the codebase. hallucinates imports, ignores how you've actually structured things. spent more time correcting context issues than i saved.

the part that bugs me more is the output looks clean but has subtle problems. it'll reach for innerHTML where it shouldn't, handle user input in ways that aren't production-safe. easy to miss in review when you're moving fast and the code looks confident

the copy paste concern is the most interesting bit honestly - even when it's not literally copy-pasting, AI error handling often looks correct but silently eats exceptions or returns wrong defaults. it gets the structure but misses what the code actually needs to do.

the boilerplate stuff is spot on though. the 10-type dispatch pattern is exactly where i gave up doing it manually

makes sense honestly - straight port from a solid SDK beats reimplementing everything from scratch. local memory optimization is one of those rabbit holes anyway. construction code being messy is just that stage of the project