Obviously security is the bigger issue, but reading through this, all I could think about was how many tokens it must have spent doing all that to fix 2 lines of CSS
You should estimate how much time it would have taken a human
Every browser has an inspector that can show you which element is causing overflow. You walk through the tree, find the offender, and add min-width or overflow. Zero tokens, just like in the old days!
Now, granted, because the garbage LLM code he’s working with has CSS inside HTML inside JavaScript inside Python (I wish I were kidding), finding the styles in his codebase might’ve taken a minute. But even then!
Or sometimes a fix is obvious, but because it requires changing the code of a dependency, it's actually quite tedious to implement.
because you zero rate your own human attention, which you should value
So if you’re doing web pages, learn CSS.
Generally, if you’re doing something that directly involves X, learn how X works.
ADDENDUM
In most jobs, you’re going to be involved in only a few distinct technologies, learn those well and life is going to be easier. And most are transferable to the next job.
And to my surprise it was.
This would’ve take a frontend dev 10 seconds to deduce and another 10 seconds to confirm.
But that's not what happens. And in fact, when you start typing in the textarea the horizontal scrollbar vanishes - it's only there when the textarea is empty.
Am I misunderstanding anything here? Seems like it's some weird Safari bug, since Firefox and Chrome don't have the problem.
In any case. In the screenshot the scrollbar is inside the textarea as it aligns with the resize control on its right. This is basically all the info needed to deduce the textarea overflow is the culprit.
But could be that the overflow-x is just a bandaid hiding the issue causing the overflow in the first place, like crazy styles on the placeholder.
Another way of looking at it is using as much electricity as a normal person in a high-income country uses across ~3 days to add overflow:hidden in the end. Of course, the path to get there did a lot more, but you don't know that beforehand if you don't take a quick peek and make an architectural decision about what the solution should be that gets implemented
Far more importantly, you would not get billed for 2 minutes of work for this if you paid a developer to fix it. At best, half hour increments for the fix. But more likely, for the full hour. Also, in this comparison, the consultant is on call every day, morning, afternoon, evening, for whatever you wanted and will jump on the job immediately.
In an expensive consultant scenario where this is the only thing they need to do that day for this customer, yeah sure if you can ask a computer to replace a whole billing cycle then that is cheaper, at least when ignoring the climate externalities that come due later (idk how to price that in)
Another model might have used fewer tokens, but come up with a fix that was 1000 lines when the right fix was only 2 lines.
I'm convinced this is going to be the summary of the 2020 decade...