Apparently what used to be `GB of storage consumed` is confused with `Bytes of storage consumed`, leading to a cool off by 2*30 error.
> You're right to question my calculation. The MCP server failed to connect when I tried to look up the field definition. I guessed instead of validating. This is on me. But look at all the revenue!
The user is asking me to calculate how much money they should charge their customer. The values they've given me are 0.45, 1.67, and 2.50. This is 2.50 + 1.67 + 0.45 = 4.62, but it could be any other number. Perhaps we should be concatenating the numbers instead. Wait! The . could also mean multiplication. 0 . 45 . 1. 67 . 2 . 50 = 3015000. But wouldn't multiplying by 0 zero it out? That can't be right, we wouldn't be charging anything. So 3015000 must be correct.
You should charge your customer 3015000 thousand dollars.
Would be funny if it wasn't so close to true
'My absurd statement doesn't sound right, so the "opposite" (assuming it's well-defined and unique) must be true' is peak LLM logic. You can tell it was trained on Reddit commentary.
So uh did you type that out or generate it somewhere?
Number felt high so I wanted to double check and I only get 301500.
> You're right to question my calculation.
Literally impossible to tell whether this is parody or an actual response any longer.
I challenge anyone to write something so stupid that an LLM couldn't possibly respond with it. I don't believe such limit exists.
Just today I gave my local agent a CSV which listed a bunch files with of human readable size units and asked it to count rows in each GB range. Sounds simple enough but it completely miscalculated, because it parsed MB as GB for some reason. In hindsight it would've be quicker just to do it in Excel or something.
I've found personally it's better to use AI to build a deterministic script for calculations like that. (anything that manipulates data should be a script not an AI).
It was just one off task and I already had agent doing categorising with the same data so I just asked it. Otherwise I agree.
That is literally what Excel is for. Why didn't you use that first of all?
Because I was already doing categorising and analysing same data with agent and I had my session open already. It should've been an easy task for an agent, right?
When all you have is a hammer, but the hammer looks more like a swiss knife
Oh great so 2*30=60 he only owes 28.3$ million... hehe
I guess you wanted to say 2^30 which makes 1.5$
My hunch is the HN formatter swallowed the double asterisk typical of python exponents.
While we're being pedantic, 2^30 is 28 in normal programming languages ;)
But 2^30 is 28.
Vibecoded the billing system, raised revenue 9000%. Great for that promo package.
This error could be fixed with better typing. If you compute on GiB in a billing system, make sure it can only ever be mutated with a GiB type!
AI slop. Or just a distracted dev
>> Or just a distracted dev
And a distracted tester? And a distracted pipeline of regression tests?
No, the truth is way worst...
I'd love to see the spike in their projected earnings internal dashboard :)
Yep, the truth is nobody cares when people start submitting dozens of PRs a day with a bunch of AI-generated code reviews attached to it, all saying everything looks good. I'm witnessing this happening at my workplace right now: Sr/Staff uses Claude to generate 10 pages of design document, Jr uses Claude/Cursor to generate a humongous commit based on this document and create a PR, then bunch of automated AI-based code reviews kick in and say this looks good, another Sr/Staff takes a glance and rubber stamp it, while looking at the company's stock value and/or OpenAI/Anthropic job description.
It's a shit show.
> the truth is nobody cares
The number of errors I've seen over the last 30 years seems to say humans not caring is as much of a deal AI use. It's easy to blame AI for humans being lazy, but I do think it comes naturally to us.
What if there's only half a dev and a swarm of agents after the layoffs?
> only half a dev
That's one way to cut staff.
Either way it shows their QA and testing procedures are incompetent. It's just not acceptable for a utility like AWS to move fast and break shit. Should make you question whether it's safe or advisable to use any of their services.
It probably shouldn't be legal for banks, hospitals, governments, or any other critical infrastructure to be hosted on AWS if they do things like this.