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arb8020 @arb8020 · 22h this is basically what LLMs are doing in your codebase over time Habitual mitigations If I think about analogous blind spots I've had, one that jumps out at me is from when I was a little kid and a friend of mine used my computer. For this story to make sense, you have to know that this was in the mechanical mouse era. Over time, detritus would get stuck to your mouse ball and cause it to track erratically unless you cleaned it out. When my friend tried to use my computer he found it impossible to use the mouse because mouse pointer movement seemed almost random. When I sat down at the computer again and used the mouse I didn't have any problem using it at all, but on looking at what I was doing with my hand to smoothly move the pointer in a straight line, I was violently throwing my hand all over the place. I realized I must've adjusted to the detritus on the mouse ball over time as it accumulated and I was somehow compensating for the mouse's extremely erratic tracking by making countervailing erratic movements[3]. I thought it was pretty amazing that I could not notice that I was doing this and I always wonder if I'm doing some equivalent thing today. Dan Luu @danluu · Aug 29 [thumbnail of article text] Bug Blindness: danluu.com/bug-blind/
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet by arb8020 quoting Dan Luu's tweet linking his 'Bug Blindness' post, with an excerpt on habitual mitigations (adapting to a dirty mechanical mouse), captioned as analogous to what LLMs do to a codebase over time.