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270 points imasl42 | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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Etheryte ◴[] No.45660521[source]
In my opinion this is another case where people look at it as a technical problem when it's actually a people problem. If someone does it once, they get a stern message about it. If it happens twice, it gets rejected and sent to their manager. Regardless of how you authored a pull request, you are signing off on it with your name. If it's garbage, then you're responsible.
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1. pfannkuchen ◴[] No.45664880[source]
Yeah it doesn’t really seem different from people copy/pasting from stack overflow without reading through it. This isn’t really a new thing, though I guess nobody was really acting like SO was the second coming so it’s probably happening more now.
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2. jjav ◴[] No.45666306[source]
> Yeah it doesn’t really seem different from people copy/pasting from stack overflow without reading through it.

It is vastly different because there are no (as far as I've ever seen) multi-thousand line blocks of code to cut & paste as-is from stack overflow.

If you're pasting a couple dozen lines of code from a third party without understanding it, that's bad, but not unbearable to discover in a code review.

But if you're posting a 5000 line pull request that you've never read and expect me to do all your work validating it, we have a problem.

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3. pfannkuchen ◴[] No.45677153[source]
What I mean is that, at least where I’ve worked, copy/pasting from SO without checking it and taking responsibility for it was already not acceptable. Making a machine generate it instead of a human is… still not acceptable.