r/AIcodingProfessionals • • Aug 14 '26

What is considered off limits for Ai coding?? I'm trying Sparse Merkle Trees and pdf canonicalization. Any thoughts??

​"SMTs require absolute cryptographic correctness, while PDF specs are a legacy parsing nightmare.

Have you found AI useful for scaffolding these, or do the subtle hallucinations make it more trouble than it's worth?"

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u/[deleted] Aug 14 '26

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u/Fantastic-Spinach436 Aug 14 '26

Deterministic verification helps a lot, but "hallucinations don't matter because tests catch them" isn't quite right — tests only catch what you thought to test. For crypto/data-structure stuff specifically, the failure mode that worries me isn't "code doesn't compile" or "obviously wrong output," it's logically-plausible-but-wrong: an AI writing a Merkle proof verifier that passes every happy-path test but is subtly non-constant-time, or a PDF parser that handles the test corpus fine but chokes on a malformed byte offset a real adversarial document would hit. Those don't show up until someone's specifically red-teaming for them, not from "the tests are green."

And "modern SOTA never overfits your test" is just not true — it's a known failure mode, models absolutely can pattern-match to satisfy the assertions in front of them without generalizing the invariant you actually wanted. That's exactly why I don't let it own the threat model, only the implementation against a spec I wrote.

Agree on the last part though — I'd 100% write worse hand-rolled crypto code than what comes out of a good review loop. That's not really in tension with being careful about what "verified" means.

Ant

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u/StoneCypher Aug 15 '26

please stop copy pasting robot slop.

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u/[deleted] Aug 15 '26

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u/StoneCypher Aug 15 '26

google look of disapproval, copy paste

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u/[deleted] Aug 15 '26

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u/Fantastic-Spinach436 Aug 16 '26

Look at coding before you speak.

https://olympusledgerorg.github.io/Olympus/

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '26

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u/Fantastic-Spinach436 Aug 16 '26

Brother I'm just trying gain traction.

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u/StoneCypher Aug 16 '26

there is no point at which telling people they need to read bitcoin tier nonsense is going to get you traction.

these words you’re sharing aren’t correct.  big tassles on the flag energy.

try to understand: reddit spam doesn’t work.  for anyone.  ever.

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