Asking it to apply the YAGNI principle also sems to work well for trimming codebases down. Generally ask it to review, generate a list of review points, then we go through each one together and I make a decision yes/no on each one (or suggest further modifications).
One incident did leave a scar. It happened at an army outpost in southern Gaza. "I was sitting there in the command room," Maya says. "Suddenly, the soldiers on watch noticed five Palestinians crossing the line they weren't allowed to cross, heading for northern Gaza.
"Everybody went crazy. There was a big mess. The battalion commander gave an order to overwhelm them with fire, even though they hadn't been confirmed as armed or anything like that. A tank started shooting at them with its machine gun. Hundreds of bullets."
She says four of the five Palestinians were killed. "A few hours later, a D9 [Caterpillar armored bulldozer] buried them in the sand. When I asked why, they said that it was so the dogs wouldn't eat them and spread disease. The one who survived was put in a cage at the outpost, and they said we had to wait for a Shin Bet man to interrogate him."
The Palestinian sat there, cuffed and blindfolded, and seemed to be freezing from the cold. "Suddenly, one of the soldiers took out his penis and started pissing on him. He told him, 'This is for Be'eri, you asshole, this is for Nova'"– Kibbutz Be'eri and the Nova music festival, two of the sites attacked by Hamas on October 7, 2023. "Nobody could stop laughing. I might have laughed too."
Look up the article in Ha'aretz recently "IDF Soldiers Talk About the 'Moral Injury' – and the Silence" for another example of this. I mean, I am glad they are talking about it, but the way it is framed is maddening.
