211–220 of 699 posts
I’d go further and say while testing is necessary, it is not sufficient. You have to understand the code and convince yourself that it is logically correct under all relevant circumstances, by reasoning over the code. Testing only “proves” correctness for the specific state, environment, configuration, and inputs the code was tested with. In practice that only tests a tiny portion of possible circumstances, and omits…
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>It's even worse than that: non-junior devs are doing it as well. This might be unpopular, but that is seeming more like an opportunity if we want to continue allowing AI to generate code. One of the annoying things engineers have to deal with is stopping whatever they're doing and doing a review. Obviously this gets worse if more total code is being produced. We could eliminate that interruption by having someone do…
A full-time code reviewer will quickly lose touch with all practical matters and steer the codebase into some unmaintainable mess. This is not the first time somebody had that idea.
That would definitely solve the "code reviewer loses touch with reality" issue.
Whether it would be a net reduction in disruption, I don't know.
I want to distill this post into some sort of liquid I can inject directly into my dev teams. It's absolutely spot on. Seeing a PR with a change that doesn't build is one of the most disappointing things.
The requirements in this article are... the bare minimum for a PR. Like yeah it needs to work is the no duh requirement. I have seen tons of PRs that work but defy conventions or add a bunch of useless cruft that we can rip out once I sit down and talk with them about what they did. When someone pings me for a review and their code isn't even passing CI builds/tests I just let them know its failing and don't even loo…
Yeah, I'm a bit sad I felt the need to write this to be honest.
[1] I.e., it should work
That may seem pedantic but that’s a huge difference. Code is a means to an end. If no-code suddenly became better than code through some miracle, that would be your job.
This also means that if one day AI stops making mistakes, tossing AI requests over the wall may be a legitimate modus operandi.
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I often write PR descriptions, in which I write a short explanation and try to anticipate some comments I might get. Well, every time I do, I will still get those exact comments because nobody bothers reading the description. Not to say you shouldn't write descriptions, I will keep doing it because it's my job. But a lot of people just don't care enough or are too distracted to read them.
I just point people to the description. no need to type things twice.
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>It's even worse than that: non-junior devs are doing it as well. This might be unpopular, but that is seeming more like an opportunity if we want to continue allowing AI to generate code. One of the annoying things engineers have to deal with is stopping whatever they're doing and doing a review. Obviously this gets worse if more total code is being produced. We could eliminate that interruption by having someone do…
So pair programming?
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Hi, delusional developer reporting for duty here.
How are you measuring productivity these days Simon? Do you have a boss that has certain expectations? If you don't hit those are you going to lose your house?
I’d go further and say while testing is necessary, it is not sufficient. You have to understand the code and convince yourself that it is logically correct under all relevant circumstances, by reasoning over the code. Testing only “proves” correctness for the specific state, environment, configuration, and inputs the code was tested with. In practice that only tests a tiny portion of possible circumstances, and omits…