291–300 of 699 posts
The job, in the modern world, is to close tickets. The code quality is negotiable, because the entire automated software process doesn't measure code quality, just statistics. That's why I refuse to take part in it. But I'm an old-world craftsman by now, and I understand nobody wants to pay for working, well-thought-out code any more. They don't want a Chesterfield; they want plywood and glue.
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I'd go further and say vibe coding it up, testing the green case, and deploying it straight into the testing environment is good enough. The rest we can figure out during testing, or maybe you even have users willing to beta-test for you. This way, while you're still on the understanding part and reasoning over the code, your competitor already shipped ten features, most of them working. Ok, that was a provocative sc…
This approach sounds like a great way to get a lot of security holes into your code. Maybe your competitors will be faster at first, but it’s probably better to be a bit slower and not leaking all your users data.
If I had a backend API that was serving user data, I'd of course check more carefully.
This kind of mistake always seemed amateurish to me.
I know this won't be popular, however, I think the idea of differentiating a "real developer" from one who relies mostly, or even solely on an LLM is coming to an end. Right now, I fully agree relying wholly upon an LLM and failing to test it is very irresponsible. LLMs do make mistakes. They do a sloppy job at times. But give it a year. Two years. five years. It seems unreasonable to assume they will hit a plateau t…
> There was too much "art," experience, and nuance to the game that a computer could ever fully grasp or understand. That's the thing though, AI doesn't understand, it makes us feel like it understands, but it doesn't understand anything.
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Code review is rarely done live. It's usually asynchronous, giving the reviewer plenty of time to read, digest, and give considered feedback on the changes. Perhaps a spicy patch would involve some kind of meeting. Or maybe in a mentor/mentee situation where you'd want high-bandwidth communication.
Doing only IRL code reviews would certainly improve quality in some projects :) It's probably also fairly expensive to do.
> The first is manual testing. If you haven’t seen the code do the right thing yourself, that code doesn’t work. If it does turn out to work, that’s honestly just pure chance. Depending on exactly what the author meant here, I disagree. Our first and default tool should be some form of lightweight automated testing. It's explicit (serves a form of spec and docs how to use the software), it's repeatable (manual testin…
Unless you are working on a tiny change on a highly tested part of the code you should be manually testing your code and/or adding some tests.
> there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of LLM tool, who deposits giant, untested PRs on their coworkers—or open source maintainers—and expects the “code review” process to handle the rest. It's even worse than that: non -junior devs are doing it as well.
>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…
Thr only way to be 100% sure is writing it myself. If I know some one reasonable managed to write the code I can usually take some shortcuts and only look at the code style, common gotchas etc.
Of course it wouldn't be the first time I made some erroneous assumptions about how well considered the code was. But if none of the code is the product of any intelligent thought well, I might as well stop reading and start writing. Reading code is 10x harder than writing it after all.
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Where are the junior devs while their code is being reviewed? I'm not a software developer, but I'd be loath to review someone's work unless they have enough skin in the game to be present for the review.
Code review is rarely done live. It's usually asynchronous, giving the reviewer plenty of time to read, digest, and give considered feedback on the changes. Perhaps a spicy patch would involve some kind of meeting. Or maybe in a mentor/mentee situation where you'd want high-bandwidth communication.
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Where are the junior devs while their code is being reviewed? I'm not a software developer, but I'd be loath to review someone's work unless they have enough skin in the game to be present for the review.
As someone else mentioned, the process is async. But I achieve a similar effect by requiring my team to review their own PRs before they expect a senior developer to review them and approve for merging. That solves some of the problem with people thinking it's okay to fire off a huge AI slop PR and make it the reviewer's responsibility to see how much the LLM hallucinated. No, you have to look at yourself first, beca…
I'm having a hard time imagining the alternative. Do junior developers not take any pride in their work? I want to be sure my code works before I submit it for review. It's embarrassing to me if it fails basic requirements. And as a reviewer, what I want to see more than anything is how the developer assessed that their code works. I don't want to dig into the code unless I need to -- show me the validation and results, and convince me why I should approve it.
I've seen plenty of examples of developers who don't know how to effectively validate their work, or document the validation. But that's different than no validation effort at all.