Post #569473
2026-03-04 13:37 UTC
We started using Claude code at work. In a reasonable way, I must say: let's give it a spin, see what it can do for us, treat it as a tool in the toolbox, not a developer-displacing silver bullet, etc.
Anyway, I was working on a ticket, took time to install the CLI, and then asked it to generate a test for some new code I wrote (usually I TDD, sometimes I code my way first to a solution, it depends. No silver bullets, just tools in the toolbox).
What happened next made me giggle, because the test was hilariously bad and full of all sorts of antipatterns.
What happened _next_ made me cry. I realized that Anthropic just scraped all the Elixir code it could get its hands on so the style of test its product generates reflects the general "state of the art" in the Elixir community.
Realizing that made me very sad. I guess it's time to write a blog post on proper test approaches in Elixir (too bad I cannot use Claude's code as a showcase as it is work code, it'd be a great exposition piece).
(cont)
Replies (3)
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@krono@toot.berlin 2026-03-04 13:39
@cdegroot Regression to the mean codified
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@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz 2026-03-04 21:19
@cdegroot Did I miss the continuation? I'm curious about what made you very sad. I can guess, but...
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@jbrains@mastodon.social 2026-03-09 10:58
@cdegroot LLMs mostly make Common Practice even more common. That might work well, unless Common Practice lies well below your individual standards. :)