←back to thread

270 points imasl42 | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
Show context
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.

replies(14): >>45660176 #>>45660177 #>>45660521 #>>45661077 #>>45661716 #>>45661920 #>>45662128 #>>45662216 #>>45662752 #>>45663314 #>>45664245 #>>45672060 #>>45679145 #>>45683742 #
1. zamalek ◴[] No.45663314[source]
> LLM-written ones are almost entirely additive

I have noticed Claude's extreme and obtuse reluctance to delete code, even code that it just wrote that I told it is wrong. For example, it might produce a fn:

   fn foo(bar)
And then I say, no, I actually wanted you to "foo with a frobnitz", so now we get:

   fn foo(bar) // Never called
   fn foo_with_frobnitz(bar)
replies(1): >>45666620 #
2. igor47 ◴[] No.45666620[source]
This tendency must get reenforced through RL in the training phase. It's very high profile when an LLM deletes the wrong thing, eg https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/07/ai-co...