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I keep getting downvoted for saying this but I still review all of my AI generated code. I feel like I’m sufficiently sped up. Of course you can go faster if y

by tyleo 17d ago

I keep getting downvoted for saying this but I still review all of my AI generated code. I feel like I’m sufficiently sped up. Of course you can go faster if you don’t read the code at all, that’s always been true. But it seems like the ability to emit large quantities of text is already a huge leap in productivity. I don’t think these tools are good enough yet to offload all or our thinking into them.

Hugsbox 17d ago
IMO human-verifying will always be a must, no matter how good the LLMs get. If I'm shipping code that I don't understand and it ends up having major problems, I'm still the one who's responsible for it, not the LLM.
- Kinrany 17d ago
  You could ship code without understanding it, it just needs to be treated as throwaway, unreliable and potentially malicious. This is OK for some tasks, e.g. best-effort scraping of a frequently updated website that's actively hostile to automation
mortalapeman 17d ago
Where it really shines for me is when the best solution is explicit and obvious code, but really tedious to write. Now I'll choose to have AI write it instead of me, where before I might have tried to write a bad abstraction. Things like generating a TypedDict for a JSON A document I'm returning as a convenience from a postgres query.
Ampersander 17d ago
What do you say to your boss if they ask why your colleague is producing 10-100x the kloc as you?
- tyleo 17d ago
  I'd ask what outcome we are trying to achieve.
MyelinatedT 17d ago
I also review all of my AI-generated code. I feel that it’s disrespectful to my teammates to send unverified slop for review. I’ve noticed that while my coding skills have very noticeably atrophied (to the point I am consciously scheduling time to manually code, just for practice), my ability to read and comprehend code quickly has actually improved quite dramatically. I notice style inconsistencies and semantic errors far more quickly and consistently when reviewing both human- and LLM-generated code, as compared to a year ago. Cognitive tradeoff hypothesis and all that…

by tyleo 17d ago

Hugsbox 17d ago

IMO human-verifying will always be a must, no matter how good the LLMs get. If I'm shipping code that I don't understand and it ends up having major problems, I'm still the one who's responsible for it, not the LLM.

Kinrany 17d ago
You could ship code without understanding it, it just needs to be treated as throwaway, unreliable and potentially malicious. This is OK for some tasks, e.g. best-effort scraping of a frequently updated website that's actively hostile to automation

mortalapeman 17d ago

Where it really shines for me is when the best solution is explicit and obvious code, but really tedious to write. Now I'll choose to have AI write it instead of me, where before I might have tried to write a bad abstraction. Things like generating a TypedDict for a JSON A document I'm returning as a convenience from a postgres query.

Ampersander 17d ago

What do you say to your boss if they ask why your colleague is producing 10-100x the kloc as you?

tyleo 17d ago
I'd ask what outcome we are trying to achieve.

MyelinatedT 17d ago

I also review all of my AI-generated code. I feel that it’s disrespectful to my teammates to send unverified slop for review. I’ve noticed that while my coding skills have very noticeably atrophied (to the point I am consciously scheduling time to manually code, just for practice), my ability to read and comprehend code quickly has actually improved quite dramatically. I notice style inconsistencies and semantic errors far more quickly and consistently when reviewing both human- and LLM-generated code, as compared to a year ago. Cognitive tradeoff hypothesis and all that…