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270 points imasl42 | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.423s | source
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strix_varius ◴[] No.45659881[source]
To me, the most salient point was this:

> Code reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as they come to the crushing realization that they are now the first layer of quality control instead of one of the last. Asked to review; forced to pick apart. Calling out freshly added functions that are never called, hallucinated library additions, and obvious runtime or compilation errors. All while the author—who clearly only skimmed their “own” code—is taking no responsibility, going “whoopsie, Claude wrote that. Silly AI, ha-ha.”

LLMs have made Brandolini's law ("The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it") perhaps understated. When an inexperienced or just inexpert developer can generate thousands of lines of code in minutes, the responsibility for keeping a system correct & sane gets offloaded to the reviewers who still know how to reason with human intelligence.

As a litmus test, look at a PR's added/removed LoC delta. LLM-written ones are almost entirely additive, whereas good senior engineers often remove as much code as they add.

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jihadjihad ◴[] No.45660177[source]
> whereas good senior engineers often remove as much code as they add

https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

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1. MisterTea ◴[] No.45661408[source]
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." - Ken Thompson
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2. sevenseacat ◴[] No.45667712[source]
oh yes I've had times like this.

Recently I was looking at building a gnarly form, that had some really complex interactions and data behind it. It just kept being subtly buggy in all different ways. I threw Claude at it, went down so many rabbit holes, it was convinced there were bugs in all the different frameworks and libraries I was using because it couldn't find the issue in the code (that it had written most of).

After a couple of days of tearing my hair out, I eventually dug in and rewrote it from first principles myself. The code afterwards was so much shorter, so much clearer, and worked a hell of a lot better (not going to say perfectly, but, well, haven't had a single issue with it since).