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196 points yuedongze | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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donatj ◴[] No.46203745[source]
I have been a developer for twenty years now. For me to trust code, my want is to understand every single line. I learned long ago working on projects with a team that that becomes impossible for a single person on large projects. I learned to trust that someone understands the code and between blames and Slack I can almost always hunt that person down.

More and more often, while doing code review, I find I will not understand something and I will ask, and the "author" will clearly have no idea what it is doing either.

I find it quite troubling how little actual human thought is going into things. The AIs context window is not nearly large enough to fully understand the entire scope of any decently sized applications ecosystem. It just takes small peaks at bits and makes decisions based on a tiny slice of the world.

It's a powerful tool and as such needs to be guided with care.

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MLgulabio ◴[] No.46205688[source]
Software becomes legacy very fast.

I have seen so many projects were people who understood all of it, are just gone. They moved, did something else etc.

As soon as this happens, you no longer have anyone 'getting it'. You have to handle so many people adding/changing very thin lines across all components and you can only hope that the original people had enough foresight adding enough unit tests for core decisions.

So i really don't mind AI here anymore.

replies(1): >>46212323 #
1. rnewme ◴[] No.46212323[source]
Not sure why this is dead, but in nearly all of my consulting gigs sooner or later I ended up having to check on project/service that is effectively abandoned. Last time this morning. Luckily I had claude code and CLI tools to go through few dozen repos and millions LOC to find some obscure endpoints and data structures, since there wasn't even anyone to ask what to look for.