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371 points ulrischa | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.278s | 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. lsy ◴[] No.43244380[source]
I'm also put off by the author's condescension towards people who aren't convinced after using the technology. It's not the user's job to find a product useful, it's a product's job to be useful for the user. If a programmer puts a high value on being able to trust a program's output to be minimally conformant to libraries and syntax that are literally available to the program, and places a high value on not having to babysit every line of code that you review and write, that's the programmer's prerogative in their profession, not some kind of moral failing.