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saidinesh5 19 minutes ago [-]
We faced a lot of this this year. Eager new joinees sent 100s of lines of CLs to review to "improve" little things.
Not only did the new changes did not fix what they thought it would fix but it broke other things in unexpected ways.
I brought in two changes after that:
* I'm not reviewing/reading anything that you yourself did not read / test in the target environments properly. If all it takes is an LLM prompt, I could be issuing the same prompt to make my life easier.. and If you're sending a CL, you should be owning the code you send.
* Me being more involved in the design process so review burden itself becomes lower. A bit of pair programming from time to time helped too.
Not sure how things will turn out after this but so far they seem better.
geraneum 3 minutes ago [-]
> An LLM defaults to building when it should be buying. Not because it doesn’t know about existing libraries, it often mentions them, but because for an LLM, writing two hundred lines of implementation is the same cognitive effort as writing two lines of import.
Or maybe they are trained that way. It’s more tokens used and more money you need to pay.
dap 2 hours ago [-]
If your plan is to not review and just have the LLM rewrite if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t sound like the rewrite is gonna be any better.
dmitrig01 2 hours ago [-]
Writing blog posts has become cheap, making them sound human has become hard.
netsharc 2 hours ago [-]
The simple sentences LLM keep generating break my brain, it's like 95% of writing is now 3rd grade level.
That's not just you imagining things, that's the world around you changing. That's real and it matters.
girvo 17 minutes ago [-]
You could even argue that it’s the load-bearing point!
gobdovan 35 minutes ago [-]
> Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.
> Nowadays every business in America says how warm it is and how much it cares — loan companies, supermarkets, hamburger chains.
Guess which one is AI and which one is a quote from Martin Amis.
25 minutes ago [-]
defen 1 hours ago [-]
Martin Amis level prose is neither possible nor desirable for a technical blog post.
DiscourseFan 1 hours ago [-]
I don't think that there is anything wrong with having stylistic depth in any wriitng
ShinyLeftPad 1 hours ago [-]
Why?
eschneider 2 hours ago [-]
Failures in production remain expensive.
rixed 32 minutes ago [-]
I wish they were.
Displaying an error message to the user, asking to try again later, is way too cheap in my opinion.
Analemma_ 26 minutes ago [-]
Do they, though? AWS and CloudFlare recently had the worst outages in their history, and GitHub is flirting with zero nines of uptime these days. Doesn’t seem to have cost them any business.
m463 2 hours ago [-]
ai can do some of the reviewing, checking calling and called arguments, even things like crufty shell scripts.
but the higher-level "should you do this?" or "check your design" - could AI do that stuff?
lericzhang 28 minutes ago [-]
It's difficult to spot issues from a huge diff.
But when a agent finish a task, it remembers what it just went through, where it got stuck, when it got corrected by human, what code make it want to say the F word to the author, that would be a good chance to make the codebase cleaner.
ShinyLeftPad 1 hours ago [-]
> ai can do some of the reviewing
No way this can backfire.
> checking calling and called arguments
Like a static language compiler already does?
m463 59 minutes ago [-]
I got to see greptile and it had a pretty decent code review, somewhat like a static analysis tool without a lot of time wasting nonsense/false positives.
When I've used static analysis tools, the first run is usually helpful as you cherry pick the things that need to be fixed, but then subsequent runs are just the false positives or "only slightly a nit" kind of annoyances.
But human developers are the ones that say stuff like "Do we really have to use a database at all?" etc...
shepherdjerred 1 hours ago [-]
IMO it can, about as well as an entry/mid level dev
ares623 2 hours ago [-]
I think the question is now "should you care?" And it seems the magnificent, incorruptible thought leaders of our time are all converging on "No"
2 hours ago [-]
2 hours ago [-]
hluska 2 hours ago [-]
I’m not sure I agree with this or maybe I don’t understand. In my experience, the over engineered code LLMs create have more big problems. Rewriting vast parts of code when I have an outage or need a new feature means the code evolves far faster than my understanding. That gets more and more dangerous. Or maybe I’m not smart enough to follow the new pace?
bryanlarsen 1 hours ago [-]
AFAICT, the author is talking about rewriting code during a review as part of the review process.
quote: "If I identify code that’s more complex than it needs to be, in my own work or in someone else’s PR"
If so, that makes a lot of sense to me. The best time to rewrite code is before it hits production.
joshka 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nryoo 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
simianwords 3 hours ago [-]
Why is reviewing hard? I use LLMs for reviewing. It is dogmatic to review every line written by an LLM.
bryanlarsen 2 hours ago [-]
LLM's are good at some types of reviews and awful at others. They generally tend to overcomplicate things and miss opportunities to simplify. They pretty much have to take pre-existing code and tests as gospel and cannot distinguish which is buggy, incomplete, unimportant or important. They have no knowledge of unwritten business requirements, customer preferences, et cetera so high level review is always necessary.
CBLT 2 hours ago [-]
I also like having long, pointed conversations with LLMs as I review code. Then when I'm done, it's different code, and it has all of my blind spots and knowledge gaps, so I cannot effectively review it anymore.
It's like turning a code review that requests you, into a code review that requests someone else. And it tramples on the original author quite a bit too. It's hard only having the ability to add incremental value to large amounts of code, instead of large amounts of value to incremental code.
happytoexplain 2 hours ago [-]
I'm confused - are you purposefully pretending that the author isn't talking about human review?
gravypod 3 hours ago [-]
What kind of systems do you work on? Does it have production traffic? Is there a cost to downtime?
g-b-r 1 hours ago [-]
always true to your name
cyanydeez 2 hours ago [-]
you arnt reviewing. youre playing loophole semantics.
Not only did the new changes did not fix what they thought it would fix but it broke other things in unexpected ways.
I brought in two changes after that:
* I'm not reviewing/reading anything that you yourself did not read / test in the target environments properly. If all it takes is an LLM prompt, I could be issuing the same prompt to make my life easier.. and If you're sending a CL, you should be owning the code you send.
* Me being more involved in the design process so review burden itself becomes lower. A bit of pair programming from time to time helped too.
Not sure how things will turn out after this but so far they seem better.
Or maybe they are trained that way. It’s more tokens used and more money you need to pay.
Compare that to e.g. Martin Amis: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Amis
> Nowadays every business in America says how warm it is and how much it cares — loan companies, supermarkets, hamburger chains.
Guess which one is AI and which one is a quote from Martin Amis.
but the higher-level "should you do this?" or "check your design" - could AI do that stuff?
No way this can backfire.
> checking calling and called arguments
Like a static language compiler already does?
When I've used static analysis tools, the first run is usually helpful as you cherry pick the things that need to be fixed, but then subsequent runs are just the false positives or "only slightly a nit" kind of annoyances.
But human developers are the ones that say stuff like "Do we really have to use a database at all?" etc...
quote: "If I identify code that’s more complex than it needs to be, in my own work or in someone else’s PR"
If so, that makes a lot of sense to me. The best time to rewrite code is before it hits production.
It's like turning a code review that requests you, into a code review that requests someone else. And it tramples on the original author quite a bit too. It's hard only having the ability to add incremental value to large amounts of code, instead of large amounts of value to incremental code.