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192 points imasl42 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.209s | source
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rsynnott ◴[] No.45311963[source]
This idea that you can get good results from a bad process as long as you have good quality control seems… dubious, to say the least. “Sure, it’ll produce endless broken nonsense, but as long as someone is checking, it’s fine.” This, generally, doesn’t really work. You see people _try_ it in industry a bit; have a process which produces a high rate of failures, catch them in QA, rework (the US car industry used to be notorious for this). I don’t know of any case where it has really worked out.

Imagine that your boss came to you, the tech lead of a small team, and said “okay, instead of having five competent people, your team will now have 25 complete idiots. We expect that their random flailing will sometimes produce stuff that kinda works, and it will be your job to review it all.” Now, you would, of course, think that your boss had gone crazy. No-one would expect this to produce good results. But somehow, stick ‘AI’ on this scenario, and a lot of people start to think “hey, maybe that could work.”

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1. cyphar ◴[] No.45312107[source]
It also assumes that people who are "good" at the standard code review process (which is tuned for reviewing code written by humans with some level of domain experience and thus finding human-looking mistakes) will be able to translate their skills perfectly to reviewing code written by AI. There have been plenty of examples where this review process was shown to be woefully insufficient for things outside of this scope (for instance, malicious patches like the bad patches scandal with Linux a few years ago or the xz backdoor were only discovered after the fact).

I haven't had to review too much AI code yet, but from what I've seen it tends to be the kind of code review that really requires you to think hard and so seems likely to lead to mistakes even with decent code reviewers. (I wouldn't say that I'm a brilliant code reviewer, but I have been doing open source maintenance full-time for around a decade at this point so I would say I have some experience with code reviews.)