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Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap

#11

Post by bryanlarsen »

simianwords wrote: post #2

Why is reviewing hard? I use LLMs for reviewing. It is dogmatic to review every line written by an LLM.

LLM's are good at some types of reviews and awful at others. They generally tend to overcomplicate things and miss opportunities to simplify. They pretty much have to take pre-existing code and tests as gospel and cannot distinguish which is buggy, incomplete, unimportant or important. They have no knowledge of unwritten business requirements, customer preferences, et cetera so high level review is always necessary.

Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap

#12

Post by netsharc »

dmitrig01 wrote: post #5

Writing blog posts has become cheap, making them sound human has become hard.

The simple sentences LLM keep generating break my brain, it's like 95% of writing is now 3rd grade level.

Compare that to e.g. Martin Amis: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Amis

Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap

#15

Post by joshka »

hluska wrote: post #9

I’m not sure I agree with this or maybe I don’t understand. In my experience, the over engineered code LLMs create have more big problems. Rewriting vast parts of code when I have an outage or need a new feature means the code evolves far faster than my understanding. That gets more and more dangerous. Or maybe I’m not smart enough to follow the new pace?

[flagged]

Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap

#16

Post by ares623 »

m463 wrote: post #10

ai can do some of the reviewing, checking calling and called arguments, even things like crufty shell scripts. but the higher-level "should you do this?" or "check your design" - could AI do that stuff?

I think the question is now "should you care?" And it seems the magnificent, incorruptible thought leaders of our time are all converging on "No"

Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap

#19

Post by defen »

netsharc wrote: post #12
dmitrig01 wrote: post #5

Writing blog posts has become cheap, making them sound human has become hard.

The simple sentences LLM keep generating break my brain, it's like 95% of writing is now 3rd grade level. Compare that to e.g. Martin Amis: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Amis

Martin Amis level prose is neither possible nor desirable for a technical blog post.

Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap

#20

Post by bryanlarsen »

hluska wrote: post #9

I’m not sure I agree with this or maybe I don’t understand. In my experience, the over engineered code LLMs create have more big problems. Rewriting vast parts of code when I have an outage or need a new feature means the code evolves far faster than my understanding. That gets more and more dangerous. Or maybe I’m not smart enough to follow the new pace?

AFAICT, the author is talking about rewriting code during a review as part of the review process.

quote: "If I identify code that’s more complex than it needs to be, in my own work or in someone else’s PR"

If so, that makes a lot of sense to me. The best time to rewrite code is before it hits production.

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