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371 points ulrischa | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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Terr_ ◴[] No.43238043[source]
[Recycled from an older dupe submission]

As much as I've agreed with the author's other posts/takes, I find myself resisting this one:

> I'll finish this rant with a related observation: I keep seeing people say “if I have to review every line of code an LLM writes, it would have been faster to write it myself!”

> Those people are loudly declaring that they have under-invested in the crucial skills of reading, understanding and reviewing code written by other people.

No, that does not follow.

1. Reviewing depends on what you know about the expertise (and trust) of the person writing it. Spending most of your day reviewing code written by familiar human co-workers is very different from the same time reviewing anonymous contributions.

2. Reviews are not just about the code's potential mechanics, but inferring and comparing the intent and approach of the writer. For LLMs, that ranges between non-existent and schizoid, and writing it yourself skips that cost.

3. Motivation is important, for some developers that means learning, understanding and creating. Not wanting to do code reviews all day doesn't mean you're bad at them. Also, reviewing an LLM's code has no social aspect.

However you do it, somebody else should still be reviewing the change afterwards.

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theshrike79 ◴[] No.43240863[source]
You can see the patterns a.k.a. "code smells"[0] in code 20x faster than you can write code yourself.

I can browse through any Java/C#/Go code and without actually reading every keyword see how it flows and if there's something "off" about how it's structured. And if I smell something I can dig down further and see what's cooking.

If your chosen language is difficult/slow to read, then it's on you.

And stuff should have unit tests with decent coverage anyway, those should be even easier for a human to check, even if the LLM wrote them too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell

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1. skywhopper ◴[] No.43241314[source]
Wow, what a wildly simplistic view you have of programming. “Code smells” (god, I hate that term) are not the only thing that can be wrong. Unit tests only cover what they cover. Reviewing the code is only one piece of the overall cost here.