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371 points ulrischa | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.264s | 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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1. saghm ◴[] No.43243749[source]
The crux of this seems to be that "reviewing code written by other people" isn't the same as "reviewing code written by LLMs". The "human" element of human-written code allows you to utilize social knowledge as well as technical, and that can even be built up over time when reviewing the same persons' code. Maybe there's some equivalent of this that people can develop when dealing with LLM code, but I don't think many people have it now (if it even does exist), and I don't even know what it would look like.