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

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

seangoedecke.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 203 posts

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

#131

Post by crazygringo »

skydhash wrote: post #108
crazygringo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know what to tell you. Sure there are tools like IDE's to help, but it doesn't help with everything.

The simple fact is that I find there's very little creative satisfaction to be found in writing most functions. Once you've done it 10,000 times, it's not exactly fun anymore, I mean unless you're working on some cutting-edge algorithm which is not what we're doing 99.9% of the time.

The creative part becomes in the higher level of design, where it's no longer rote. This is the whole reason why people move up into architecture roles, designing systems and libraries and API's instead of writing lines of code.

The analogies with guitar players or race car drivers or writers are flawed, because nothing they do is rote. Every note matters, every turn, every phrase. They're about creativity and/or split-second decision making.

But when you're writing code, that's just not the case. For anything that's a 10- or 20- line function, there isn't usually much creativity there, 99.99% of the time. You're just translating an idea into code in a straightforward way.

So when you say, "Developers like _writing_ and that gives the most job satisfaction." That's just not true. Especially not for many experienced devs. Developers like thinking, in my experience. They like designing, the creative part. Not the writing part. The writing is just the means to the end.

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

#132

Post by CuriouslyC »

Jensson wrote: post #120
thunky wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

People have built complex working mostly bug free products without code reviews so humans are not that flawed. With humans and code reviews now two humans looked at it. With LLM and code review of the LLM output now one human looked at it, so its not the same. LLM are still far from as reliable as humans or you could just tell the LLM to do code reviews and then it builds the entire complex product itself.

People have built complex bug free software without __formal__ code review. It's very rare to write complex bug free software without at least __informal__ code review, and it's luck, not skill.

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

#133

Post by CuriouslyC »

jvanderbot wrote: post #81
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…

What happens is a kind of feeling of developing a meta skill. It's tempting to believe the scope of what you can solve has expanded when you are self-assessed as "good" with AI. Its the same with any "general" tech. I've seen it since genetic algorithms were all the rage. Everyone reaches for the most general tool, then assumes everything that tool might be used for is now a problem or domain they are an expert in, w…

That's an oversimplification. AI can genuinely expand the scope of things you can do. How it does this is a bit particular though, and bears paying attention to.

Normally, if you want to achieve some goal, there is a whole pile of tasks you need to be able to complete to achieve it. If you don't have the ability complete any one of those tasks, you will be unable to complete the goal, even if you're easily able to accomplish all the other tasks involved.

AI raises your capability floor. It isn't very effective at letting you accomplish things that are meaningfully outside your capability/comprehension, but if there are straightforward knowledge/process blockers that don't involve deeper intuition it smooths those right out.

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

#134

Post by esafak »

moffkalast wrote: post #74
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…

> Sure, it’ll produce endless broken nonsense, but as long as someone is checking, it’s fine Well you've just described an EKF on a noisy sensor.

I do not think anybody is going to get that reference. https://xkcd.com/2501/

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

#135

Post by esafak »

pmg101 wrote: post #61
crazygringo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Developers like _writing_ and that gives the most job satisfaction. Not me. I enjoy figuring out the requirements, the high-level design, and the clever approach that will yield high performance, or reuse of existing libraries, or whatever it is that will make it an elegant solution. Once I've figured all that out, the actual process of writing code is a total slog. Tracking variables, remembering syntax, trying to…

You don't really know if the system design you've architected in your mind is any good though, do you, until you've actually tried coding it. Discovering all the little edge cases at that point is hard work ("a total slog") because it's where you find out where the flaws in your thinking were, and how your beautifully imagined abstractions fall down. Then after going back and forth between thinking about it and tryin…

He did not say he does not iterate! And it is much easier and faster to do when an LLM is involved.

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

#136

Post by jvanderbot »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #133
jvanderbot wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens is a kind of feeling of developing a meta skill. It's tempting to believe the scope of what you can solve has expanded when you are self-assessed as "good" with AI. Its the same with any "general" tech. I've seen it since genetic algorithms were all the rage. Everyone reaches for the most general tool, then assumes everything that tool might be used for is now a problem or domain they are an expert in, w…

That's an oversimplification. AI can genuinely expand the scope of things you can do. How it does this is a bit particular though, and bears paying attention to. Normally, if you want to achieve some goal, there is a whole pile of tasks you need to be able to complete to achieve it. If you don't have the ability complete any one of those tasks, you will be unable to complete the goal, even if you're easily able to ac…

Normally, one would learn the missing steps, with or without AI.

You're probably envisioning a more responsible use if it (floor raising, "meaningfully inside your comprehension"), that is actually not what I'm referring to at all ( "assumes everything that tool might be used for is now a problem or domain they are an expert in"). A meta tech can be used in many ways and yours is close to what I believe the right method is. But I'm asserting that the danger is massive over reliance and over confidence in the "transferability".

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

#137

Post by rhetocj23 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #27
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…

That depends. If the engineer, doing the implementation is top-shelf, you can get very good results from a “flawed” process (in quotes, because it’s not actually “bad.” It’s just a process that depends on the engineer being that particular one). Silicon Valley is obsessed with process over people, manifesting “magical thinking” that a “perfect” process eliminates the need for good people. I have found the truth to be…

Steve Jobs said this decades ago.

Its the content that matters, not the process.

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

#138

Post by eowyn »

What does this mean for juniors? A few companies are now introducing expectations that all engineers will use coding agents including juniors and grads. If they haven't yet learnt what good looks like through experience how are they going to review code produced by AI agents?

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

#140

Post by adastra22 »

vrighter wrote: post #25
simonw wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where are the "code-review" agents at? OpenAI's Codex Cloud just added a new feature for code review, and their new GPT-5-Codex model has been specifically trained for code review: https://openai.com/index/introducing-upgrades-to-codex/ Gemini and Claude both have code review features that work via GitHub Actions: https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/docs/review... and https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/cl…

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

Yes you can, and this shouldn't be surprising.

You can take the output of an LLM and feed it into another LLM and ask it to fact-check. Not surprisingly, these LLMs have a high false negative rate, meaning that it won't always catch the error. (I think you agree with me so far.) However the probability of these LLM failures are independent of each other, so long as you don't share context. The converse is that the LLM has a less-than-we-would-like probability of detecting a hallucination, but if it does then verification of that fact is reliable in future invocations.

Combine this together: you can ask an LLM to do X, for any X, then take the output and feed it into some number of validation instances to look for hallucinations, bad logic, poor understanding, whatever. What you get back on the first pass will look like a flip of the coin -- one agent claims it is hallucination, the other agent says it is correct; both give reasons. But feed those reasons into follow-up verifier prompts, and repeat. You will find that non-hallucination responses tend to persist, while hallucinations are weeded out. The stable point is the truth.

This works. I have workflows that make use of this, so I can attest to its effectiveness. The new-ish Claude Code sub-agent capabilities and slash commands are excellent for doing this, btw.

Post reply on HN