Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes

Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes A surprisingly common complaint I see from developers who have tried using LLMs for code is that they encountered a hallucination—usually the LLM inventing a method or even a full software library that doesn’t exist—and it crashed their confidence in LLMs as a tool for writing code. How could anyone productively use these things if they invent methods that don’t exist? Hallucinations in code are the least harmful hallucinations you can encounter from a model. The real risk from using LLMs for code is that they’ll make mistakes that aren’t instantly caught by the language compiler or interpreter. And these happen all the time! The moment you run LLM generated code, any hallucinated methods will be instantly obvious: you’ll get an error. You can fix that yourself or you can feed the error back into the LLM and watch it correct itself. Compare this to hallucinations in regular prose, where you need a critical eye, st ... Read full article.