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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

#121

Post by dwattttt »

nkmnz wrote: post #37
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…

> This idea that you can get good results from a bad process This idea is called "evolution"... > as long as you have good quality control ...and it's QA is death on every single level of the systems: cell, organism, species, and ecosystem. You must consider that those devs or companies with not-good-enough QA will end up dead (from a business perspective).

Evolution is extremely inefficient at producing good designs. Given enough time it'll explore more, because it's driven randomly, but most mutations either don't help, or downright hurt an organism's survival.

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

#122

Post by GarnetFloride »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #76
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…

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…

Oh man, that's what I've been smelling with all this. It's the Red Bead Experiment, all over again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckBfbvOXDvU

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

#123

Post by bitwize »

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…

> Imagine that your boss came to you, the tech lead of a small team, and said “okay, instead of having five competent people, your team will now have 25 complete idiots. We expect that their random flailing will sometimes produce stuff that kinda works, and it will be your job to review it all.”

This is exactly the point of corporate Agile. Management believes that the locus of competence in an organization should reside within management. Depending on competent programmers is thus a risk, and what is sought is a process that can simulate a highly competent programmer's output with a gang of mediocre programmers. Kinda like the myth that you can build one good speaker out of many crappy ones, or the principle of RAID which is to use many cheap, failure-prone drives to provide the reliability guarantees of one expensive, reliable drive (which also kinda doesn't work if the drives came from the same lot and are prone to fail at about the same time). Every team could use some sort of process, but usually if you want to retain good people, this takes the form of "disciplines regarding branching, merging, code review/approval, testing, CI, etc." Something as stifling as Scrum risks scaring your good people away, or driving them nuts.

So yes, people do expect it to work, all the time. And with AI in the mix, it now gains very nice "labor is more fungible with capital" properties. We're going to see some very nice, spectacular failures in the next few years as a result, a veritable Perseid meteor shower of critical systems going boom; and those companies that wish to remain going concerns will call in human programmers to clean up the mess (but probably lowball on pay and/or try to get away with outsourcing to places with dirt-cheap COL). But it'll still be a rough few years for us while management in many orgs gets high off their own farts.

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

#124

Post by bluefirebrand »

ben_w wrote: post #114
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that supermarket vegetables/produce are good? Quite a bit of it, like Tomatoes and Strawberries, is just crap. Form over substance. Nice color and zero flavor. Selected for delivery/shelf-life/appearance rather actually being any good.

> Form over substance. Nice color and zero flavor. Selected for delivery/shelf-life/appearance rather actually being any good. From an economics POV, that's the correct test. I was also considering the way the US food standards allows a lot of insect parts in the products, but wasn't sure how to phrase it.

> From an economics POV, that's the correct test

Maybe we could stop filtering everything through this bullshit economics race to the bottom then

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

#125

Post by TrinaryWorksToo »

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…

Bayesian reasoning would lead me to think that a high rate of failures means even if QA is 99.9% amazing and dev is AI 80% slop, there still will be more poor features and bugs (99.9% * 80% = 79.92%) than if both are mediocore (%90 * %90 = 81%)

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

#126

Post by ben_w »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #124
ben_w wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Form over substance. Nice color and zero flavor. Selected for delivery/shelf-life/appearance rather actually being any good. From an economics POV, that's the correct test. I was also considering the way the US food standards allows a lot of insect parts in the products, but wasn't sure how to phrase it.

> From an economics POV, that's the correct test Maybe we could stop filtering everything through this bullshit economics race to the bottom then

You can campaign for your government to set any legal minimum for quality that you want, but it's essentially nonsensical to expect people not to optimise for cheapest given whatever those constraints are.

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

#127

Post by kiitos »

jmcodes wrote: post #55
QuantumNoodle wrote: post #10

Code review is part of the job, but one of the least enjoyable parts. Developers like _writing_ and that gives the most job satisfaction. AI tools are helpful, but inherently increases the amount of code we have to review with more scrutiny than my colleagues because of how unpredictable - yet convincing - it can be. Why did we create tools that do the fun part and increase the non-fun part? Where are the "code-revie…

Maybe I'm weird but I don't actually enjoy the act of _writing_ code. I enjoy problem solving and creating something. I enjoy decomposing systems and putting them back together in a better state, but actually manually typing out code isn't something I enjoy. When I use an LLM to code I feel like I can go from idea to something I can work with in much less time than I would have normally. Our codebase is more type-saf…

the time spent literally typing code into an editor is never the bottleneck in any competently-run project

if the act of writing code is something you consider a burden rather than a joy then my friend you are in the wrong profession

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

#128

Post by bcrosby95 »

jmull wrote: post #49
bcrosby95 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's that simple. Fundamentally, unit tests are using the same system to write your invariants twice, it just so happens that they're different enough that failure in one tends to reveal a bug in another. You can't reasonably state this won't be the case with tools built for code review until the failure cases are examined. Furthermore a simple way to help get around this is by writing code with one pro…

> unit tests are using the same system to write your invariants twice For unit tests, the parts of the system that are the same are not under test, while the parts that are different are under test. The problem with using AI to review AI is that what you're checking is the same as what you're checking it with. Checking the output of one LLM with another brand probably helps, but they may also have a lot of similariti…

The system is the human writing the code.

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

#129

Post by bluefirebrand »

stavros wrote: post #53
brap wrote: post #34

My process is basically 1. Give it requirements 2. Tell it to ask me clarifying questions 3. When no more questions, ask it to explain the requirements back to me in a formal PRD 4. I criticize it 5. Tell it to come up with 2 alternative high level designs 6. I pick one and criticize it 7. Tell it to come up with 2 alternative detailed TODO lists 8. I pick one and criticize it 9. Tell it to come up with 2 alternative…

I have a similar, though not as detailed, process. I do the same as you up to the PRD, then give it the PRD and tell it the high level architecture, and ask it to implement components how I want them. It's still time-consuming, and it probably would be faster for me to do it myself, but I can't be bothered manually writing lines of code any more. I maybe should switch to writing code with the LLM function by function…

> but I can't be bothered manually writing lines of code any more. I maybe should switch to writing code with the LLM function by function, though.

Maybe you should consider a change of career :/

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

#130

Post by stavros »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #129
stavros wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar, though not as detailed, process. I do the same as you up to the PRD, then give it the PRD and tell it the high level architecture, and ask it to implement components how I want them. It's still time-consuming, and it probably would be faster for me to do it myself, but I can't be bothered manually writing lines of code any more. I maybe should switch to writing code with the LLM function by function…

> but I can't be bothered manually writing lines of code any more. I maybe should switch to writing code with the LLM function by function, though. Maybe you should consider a change of career :/

Why?
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