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270 points imasl42 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | 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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1. brailsafe ◴[] No.45672060[source]
I think this is why I've been feeling less productive overall lately. Partly due to the fact that more code is expected to be produced more quickly, and partly because using an agent or something puts me into the wrong frame of mind where I don't really have the full context of what I've written and why, and the amount of quality work I can produce is necessarily qualified by how much I can reliably review, line-by-line, over whatever period of time.

I've been using them more conservatively, slowing down, and manually writing things more. It's easier when I'm just replicating logic over a bunch of different well-defined properties of a clear type definition or spec, but even then results are a bit questionable sometimes.