Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

tombedor.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 551 posts

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#451

Post by doctorpangloss »

flaburgan wrote: post #182
filleduchaos wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot think of a single actual food critic that would consider it acceptable for a restaurant to serve a dish for review that they went to the restaurant next door to get. If the critic wanted to eat at/review that restaurant they would simply have gone there instead.

His point, exactly.

what is the point? this whole restaurant analogy is completely fictitious and happens nowhere, and the scenario i'm describing is happening all the time... why not just talk about the not imaginary scenario?

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#452

Post by thi2 »

swiftcoder wrote: post #321
fg137 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear they consider code review a personal activity than team activity, in the sense that they think "code review is a gate before my code can be merged" rather than "code review is a process where the team discusses, understands and improves the code". And that's not rare in teams. Lots of teams and developers do code review wrong. I even hear other people complain that I "block" their code review. I mean, if t…

> Lots of teams and developers do code review wrong In this sense, I'm not sure I've ever seen a team that does codereview "right". In the before times, most PR feedback was stylistic, with the occasional bug identified. Now that we have ubiquitous auto-formatters/linters/CI, most PR review falls into either "you misunderstood the spec", or "I disagree with your architectural choices" - and my personal feeling is tha…

Not my experience and especially for juniors reviews were an excellent tool to learn and get mentored.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#453

Post by boomlinde »

madaxe_again wrote: post #202
jmeri wrote: post #188

Why should I bother to read something someone else has not bothered to write?

It really depends. In many cases, you absolutely shouldn’t. In some however, you should. For instance, yesterday I sent a lengthy email in a language I barely speak threatening legal action against a business. I had an LLM translate/write it as it’s a language Google translate makes a mess of, every time. So in that case, you’d be advised to read it lest you end up in court.

Did you bother to read the resulting translation?

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#454

Post by tristor »

Silasdev wrote: post #374

I had a new colleague on the team, who I had to on-board. I gave him a few simple tasks, just to get him into the whole setup. He literally copy/pasted my task description into Claude and asked it to complete the task. To begin with, I didn't suspect this, so when he asked for more help, I gladly wrote up a detailed explanation with more information and detail for him to learn. Little did I know, he never read it but…

> Not even sure how I should handle it, but my first instinct was to get extremely annoyed.

My first instinct would be to have a /very/ direct conversation with that person and their manager, and the follow-on would be to escalate it further leading to their termination. That sort of behavior is unprofessional in the extreme, even in the era of AI.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#455

Post by smokedetector1 »

juanre wrote: post #250

A couple of weeks ago I essentially failed the Turing test (took to be an AI). I found it a bit annoying, so I built Possibly Made By A Human. It tracks your keyboard use (not the content, ms between keystrokes etc) and produces a signature for you. It can of course be spoofed, but that also takes some effort. Actually made by a human, signature: https://possiblymadebyahuman.com/7PuEdZs1i1

This is one of the coolest tech things I've seen in a while. Can you explain how the "Check a document" works? I'm not sure I understand how you would check if the timing aligns based only on the text content.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#456

Post by anthuswilliams »

swiftcoder wrote: post #248
niuzeta wrote: post #34

A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…

As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that…

I have been championing this mindset since well before LLMs. It is an admittedly controversial opinion, but one I hold strongly.

Code reviews are a productivity tax. No truly effective team would rely on them. The fact that so many software teams view them as indispensable just shows how few effective software teams there are in our industry.

They are akin to a quality check step in manufacturing. Part of what Deming did in revolutionizing manufacturing was eliminating the step in favor of a holistic quality metric owned by all participants and enforced with rigorous statistical process controls. As you say, we in the software industry have all the pieces (autoformatters, tests, benchmarks, etc) to operate this way, but it seems our organizational and management dynamics combat this shift at every turn.

Relevant: When this conversation comes up at work, I like to share Avery Pennarun's post about the review tax: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20260316

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#457

Post by dredmorbius »

dentemple wrote: post #352
gwd wrote: post #335

"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer. Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own? Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.…

> Either don't respond, or respond in kind. !

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/14/exclamation/> ?

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#458

Post by juanre »

smokedetector1 wrote: post #455
juanre wrote: post #250

A couple of weeks ago I essentially failed the Turing test (took to be an AI). I found it a bit annoying, so I built Possibly Made By A Human. It tracks your keyboard use (not the content, ms between keystrokes etc) and produces a signature for you. It can of course be spoofed, but that also takes some effort. Actually made by a human, signature: https://possiblymadebyahuman.com/7PuEdZs1i1

This is one of the coolest tech things I've seen in a while. Can you explain how the "Check a document" works? I'm not sure I understand how you would check if the timing aligns based only on the text content.

Thanks! I had a lot of fun doing it.

The signature includes a hash of the text, done at the browser so that the server does not have to see the content.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#459

Post by deadbabe »

hypfer wrote: post #170
deadbabe wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This no longer works when bad faith actors will push code straight from LLMs with little review, and respond to your comments with LLM responses. They will constantly leave you with the responsibility of verifying the output. You are the human in their loop. This is a brutal asymmetry. In the past, at least you knew a person probably spent more time handwriting code than you will spend reviewing it. This no longer ap…

Oh but it does. The thing that makes it scale is to default to "no" and require the other party to convince you of "yes". Just put the burden of proof where it belongs. If they don't manage, then that's their problem. Communicating this in a way that is viable for a business scenario certainly comes with its own difficulties, but that is a solvable problem. In fact, you can use AI to stress test your communication th…

Did you not read what I said, they will use LLMs to spam proof onto the human reviewer. Just endless replies with LLM generated answers until you yield and approve the PR.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#460

Post by exe34 »

If somebody throws a slop PR at me, I'd love to review it with them. I'd ask them to take me through it and explain everything until I understand exactly what they did and why. Either it will make them avoid me in the future, or it will open their eyes to how important it is to understand what you are submitting for review. I probably won't have to do it twice.
Post reply on HN