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If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

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Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

#101

Post by esperent »

walleeee wrote: post #63
esperent wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could use an LLM to give you advice on how to present that take in a more constructive manner. Partially sarcastic but I do personally use LLMs to guide my communication in very limited cases: 1. It's purely business related, and 2. I'm feeling too emotionally invested (or more likely, royally pissed off) and don't trust myself to write in a professional manner, and 3. I genuinely want the message to sound cold,…

> Why should you take the time to write back personally? Because it's 3 sentences, if you want to be way more polite and verbose than necessary. "I will close PRs if they appear to be largely LLM-generated. I am always happy to review something with care and attention if it shows the same qualities. Thanks!" The idea is to get your coworkers to stop sending you AI slop, send them AI slop in retaliation?

> if they appear to be largely LLM-generated

And then what if the person denies it?

Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

#102

Post by fhd2 »

coffeefirst wrote: post #98
fhd2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Having had the pleasure to review the work and fix the bugs of agent jockeys (generally capable developers that fell in love with Claude Code et al), I'm rather sceptical. The code often looks as if they were on mushrooms. They cannot reason about it whatsoever, like they weren't even involved, when I know they weren't completely hands off. I really believe there are people out there that produce good code with…

Yeah. I'm not even anti-LM. Little things—research, "write TS types for this object", search my codebase, go figure out exactly what line in the Django rest framework is causing this weird behavior, —are working great and saving me an hour here and 15m there. It's really obvious when people lean on it, because they don't act like a beginner (trying things that might not work) or just being sloppy (where there's a log…

Yeah, it gets so wild, downright psychedelic.

I'm definitely not anti LLM, I use them all the time. Just not for generating code. I give it a go every couple of months, probably wasting more time on it than I should. I don't think I've felt any real advancements since last year around this time, and this agentic hype seems to be a bit ahead of its time, to put it mildly. But I absolutely get a lot of value out of them.

Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

#103

Post by fhd2 »

carlmr wrote: post #75
fhd2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Having had the pleasure to review the work and fix the bugs of agent jockeys (generally capable developers that fell in love with Claude Code et al), I'm rather sceptical. The code often looks as if they were on mushrooms. They cannot reason about it whatsoever, like they weren't even involved, when I know they weren't completely hands off. I really believe there are people out there that produce good code with…

>The code often looks as if they were on mushrooms. They cannot reason about it whatsoever Interesting comparison, why not weed or alcohol?

Never tried psychedelic mushrooms, so that part is speculation. But no amount of weed or alcohol could get me even close to writing code that unhinged.

Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

#104

Post by rsynnott »

thunky wrote: post #88
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, this is the exact opposite of the best practices that Edward Deming helped develop in Japan, then brought to the west. Quality needs to come from the process, not the people. Choosing to use a process known to be flawed, then hoping that people will catch the mistakes, doesn't seem like a great idea if the goal is quality. The trouble is that LLMs can be used in many ways, but only some of those ways play to t…

> Choosing to use a process known to be flawed, then hoping that people will catch the mistakes, doesn't seem like a great idea if the goal is quality. You're also describing the software development process prior to LLMs. Otherwise code reviews wouldn't exist.

Code reviews are useful, but I think everyone would admit that they are not _perfect_.

Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

#105

Post by fhd2 »

skydhash wrote: post #66
fhd2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you, but without any enjoyment in the process, quality and productivity go down the drain real fast. The Ironies of Automation paper is something I mention a lot, the core thesis is that making humans review / rubber stamp automation reduces their work quality. People just aren't wired to do boring stuff well.

Enjoyment and rewards are the drivers for motivation.

Yeah, though in my experience, reward alone is not enough.

Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

#106

Post by rsynnott »

gus_massa wrote: post #67
rsynnott wrote: post #23

This idea that you can get good results from a bad process as long as you have good quality control seems… dubious, to say the least. “Sure, it’ll produce endless broken nonsense, but as long as someone is checking, it’s fine.” This, generally, doesn’t really work. You see people _try_ it in industry a bit; have a process which produces a high rate of failures, catch them in QA, rework (the US car industry used to be…

I'm not sure about the current state of the art, but microprocessors production is (was?) very bad. You make a lot of them in a single silicon wafer, and then test them thoughtfully until you find the few that are good. You drop all the defective ones because they are very cheap piece of sand and charge a lot for the ones that works correctly to cover all the costs. I'm not sure how this translates to programming, co…

In that case, tho, no-one’s saying “let’s be sloppy with production and make up for it in the QA” (which really used to be a US car industry strategy until the Japanese wiped the floor with them); the process is as good as it reasonably can be, there are just physical limits. Chip manufacturers spend vast amounts on reducing the error rate.

Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

#108

Post by skydhash »

crazygringo wrote: post #95
skydhash wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tracking variables, remembering syntax, That's why you have short functions so you don't have to track that many variable. And use symbol completion (a standard in many editors). > trying to think through every edge case, avoiding off-by-one errors. That is designing, not coding. Sometimes I think of an edge case, but I'm already on a task that I'd like to finish, so I just add a TODO comment. Then at least before…

You always have variables. Not just at the function level, but at the class level, object level, etc. And it's not about symbol completion, it's about remembering all the obscure differences in built-in function names and which does what. And no, off-by-one errors and edge cases are firmly part of coding, once you're writing code inside of a function. Edge cases are not "todos", they're correctly handling all possibl…

> You always have variables. Not just at the function level, but at the class level, object level, etc.

Aka the scope. And the namespace of whatever you want to access. Which is a design problem.

> And it's not about symbol completion, it's about remembering all the obscure differences in built-in function names and which does what

That's what references are for. And some IDEs bring it right alongside the editor. If not, you have online and offline references. You remember them through usage and semantics.

> And no, off-by-one errors and edge cases are firmly part of coding, once you're writing code inside of a function.

It's not. You define the happy path and error cases as part of the specs. But they're generally lacking in precision (full of ambiguities) and only care about the essential complexity. The accidental complexity comes as part of the platform and is also part of the design. Pushing those kind of errors as part of coding is shortsightedness.

> Not typing all the code and keeping track of loop states and variable conditions and index variables and exit conditions. That stuff is boring as hell, and I've written more than enough to last a lifetime already

That is like saying "Not typing all the text and keeping track of words and punctuation and paragraphs and signatures. English is boring as hell and I've written more than enough..."

If you don't like formality, say so. I've never had anyone describe coding as you did. No one things about those stuff that closely. It's like a guitar player complaining about which strings to strike with a finger. Or a race driver complaining about the angle of the steering wheel and having to press the brake.

Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

#109

Post by vrighter »

ben_w wrote: post #82
vrighter wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can't use a system with the exact same hallucination problem to check the work of another one just like it. Snake oil

Weirdly, you can not only do this, it somehow does actually catch some of its own mistakes. Not all of the mistakes, they generally still have a performance ceiling less than human experts (though even this disclaimer is still simplifying), but this kind of self-critique is basically what makes the early "reasoning" models one up over simple chat models: for the first-n :END: tokens, replace with "wait" and see it at…

the "pick something usually better" sounds a lot like "and then draw the rest of the f*** owl"

Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

#110

Post by wg002 »

sougou wrote: post #100
swaptr wrote: post #45

AI-generated code can be useful in the early stages of a project, but it raises concerns in mature ones. Recently, a 280kloc+ Postgres parser was merged into Multigres ( https://github.com/multigres/multigres/pull/109 ) with no public code review. In open source, this is worrying. Many people rely on these projects for learning and reference. Without proper review, AI-generated code weakens their value as teaching to…

I oversaw this work, and I'm open to feedback on how things can be improved. There are some factors that make this particular situation different: This was an LLM assisted translation of the C parser from Postgres, not something from the ground up. For work of this magnitude, you cannot review line by line. The only thing we could do was to establish a process to ensure correctness. We did control the process careful…

"We intend to do more bulk copies and bulk translations like this from other projects"

Supabase’s playbook is to replicate existing products and open source projects, release them under open source, and monetize the adoption. They’ve repeated this approach across multiple offerings. With AI, the replication process becomes even faster, though it risks producing low-quality imitations that alienate the broader community and people will resent the stealing of their work.

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