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22 days agoI found code that calculated a single column in an HTML table. It was “last record created on”.
The algorithm was basically:
foreach account group
foreach account in each account group
foreach record in account.records
if record.date > maxdate
max = maxdate
It basically loaded every database record (the basic unit of record in this DATA COLLECTION SYSTEM) to find the newest one.
Customers couldn’t understand why the page took a minute to load.
It was easily replaced with a SQL query to get the max and it dropped down to a few ms.
The code was so hilariously stupid I left it commented out in the code so future developers could understand who built what they are maintaining.
I think this is the meat of how the policy will work. People can use AI or not. Nobody is going to know. But if someone slops in a giant submission and can’t explain why any of the code exists, it needs to go in the garbage.
Too many people think because something finally “works”, it’s good. Once your AI has written code that seems to work, that’s supposed to be when the human starts their work. You’re not done. You’re not almost done. You have a working prototype that you now need to turn into something of value.