←back to thread

371 points ulrischa | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.209s | source
Show context
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.

replies(6): >>43240863 #>>43241052 #>>43241581 #>>43243540 #>>43243749 #>>43244380 #
1. mcpar-land ◴[] No.43243540[source]
the part of their claim that does the heavy lifting is "code written by other people" - LLM-produced code does not fall into that category. LLM code is not written by anyone. There was no model in a brain I can empathize with and think about why they might have done this decision or that decision, or a person I can potentially contact and do code review with.