A quick-fun story.
My (ops-but-sometimes-writes-scripts-to-help-out) coworker just tapped on my shoulder and asked me to look at his code that wasn't working. It was a bit something like this:
User.includes(investments: -> { where(state: :draft) })...This is not a feature of ActiveRecord or any libraries that I'm aware of. I asked him why he thought this was valid syntax, and he pulled up his ChatGPT history. It looked something like this:
Ask: How can I dynamically preload an association with conditions in rails? (Potentially followed up with - no custom has_many associations, no preloader object, don't filter the base query, etc.)
Sometimes, you're routed to the correct answer. Which is to add the filter you want on the associated record as a standard where clause, and also add a .references(:association) to the query chain. Like so:
User.includes(:investments).where(investments: { state: :draft }).references(:investments) However, with just a few tests, you're usually routed to that bizarre, non-existent syntax of including a lambda as a keyword argument value to the association you want it applied to. I recreated this a few times below:
I was confused why the syntax "felt" familiar though, until my coworker pointed out I invented it while asking a question on the Rails forum two years ago.
Funny enough, my other "idea" in that thread is the other solution most LLMs hallucinate - accessing the Preloader object directly.
I didn't realize this when posting originally, but this still requires you to loop through the posts and load the query returned by the preloader into each posts association target. I didn't include that, and LLMs seem to be confused too.
As far as I'm aware, that forum post is the only place that you'll find that specific syntax exploration. As my comment above denotes, it would not work anyway. Why I included it in the first place is beyond me - I'm working on making my writing more concise (which is why I carved out a section to explain that, and then this, and now this explanation of that....)
Conclusion
LLMs are really smart most of the time. But, once it reaches niche topics and doesn't have sufficient context, it begins to resemble myself early in my career. Open StackOverflow, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Leeroy Jenkins style. I can't help but find it endearing.