The Daily Hallucination

SAN FRANCISCO — A developer has published a version of left-pad, the eleven-line JavaScript function whose removal broke much of the internet in 2016, that pads strings by asking an AI model how many spaces to add, and whose documentation lists the expected output as "probably" correct.

"Could it be one line with the built-in function? Yes," reads the package's documentation. "Does it need a model call? No." The package then explains how to install it.

The package requires Node.js 20, an API key, and a network connection, and returns its result asynchronously, meaning that a program that once added three spaces to a word instantly now waits for a data center to decide whether it wants to.

"This is exactly the kind of thing I would expect to see in a production codebase within three weeks," said Callum Ashdown-Reyes, a principal engineer at a Chicago insurance software company. "Not because anyone will need it. Because someone will install it by accident while trying to install something else, and then it will be load-bearing."

Ashdown-Reyes said his own company's dependency tree already contains 1,840 packages, of which he believes about 30 do something.

Early adopters said the model performed well. In a test of 1,000 strings, it padded 994 of them correctly, padded four of them on the right, and in two cases returned the string with a short note suggesting it was fine as it was.

A venture investor who asked not to be named said she had reached out to the developer about a seed round. "People keep saying it is a joke," she said. "Every successful developer tool I have ever funded began as a joke, and several of them still are."

At press time, the package had been added as a dependency by a package that adds leading zeros.