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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

#161

Post by monkeyelite »

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…

Yep. All the process in the world won’t teach you to make a system that works.

The pattern I see over and over is a team aimlessly putting a long through tickets in sprints until an engineer who knows how to solve the problem gets it on track personally.

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

#162

Post by monkeyelite »

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…

> If you don't have the ability complete any one of those tasks, you will be unable to complete the goal

Nothing has changed. Few projects start with you knowing all the answers. In the same way AI can help you learn, you can learn from books, colleagues, and trial and error for tasks you do not know.

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

#163

Post by monkeyelite »

dwaltrip wrote: post #112
bluefirebrand wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we're software evolvers now, not engineers? Sounds like a stupid path forward to me

We’ve always been software evolvers. Ideas that have been around for decades, such as “a codebase is a garden”, are even more relevant now.

Iterating on a design is not the same as throwing out crap until it works.

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

#164

Post by kiwicopple »

wg002 wrote: post #110
sougou wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 communi…

An alternative viewpoint which we are pretty open about in our docs:

> our technological choices are quite different; everything we use is open source; and wherever possible, we use and support existing tools rather than developing from scratch.

I understand that people get frustrated when there is any commercial interest associated to open source. But someone needs to fund open source efforts and we’re doing our best here. Some (perhaps non-obvious) examples

* we employ the maintainers of PostgREST, contributing directly to the project - not some private fork

* we employ maintainers of Postgres, contributing patches directly

* we have purchased and open sourced private companies, like OrioleDB, open sourced the code and made the patents freely available to everyone

* we picked up unmaintained tools and maintained them at our own cost, like the Auth server, which we upstreamed until the previous owner/company stopped accepting contributions

* we worked with open source tools/standards like TUS to contribute missing functionality like Postgres support and advisory locks

* we have sponsored adjacent open source initiatives like adding types to Elixir

* we have given equity to framework creators, which I’m certain will be the largest donation that these creators have (and will) ever receive for their open source work

* and yes, we employ the maintainers of Vitess to create a similar offering for the Postgres ecosystem under the same Apache2 license

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

#165

Post by stockresearcher »

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…

> Deming helped develop in Japan

Deming’s process was about how to operate a business in a capital-intensive industry when you don’t have a lot of capital (with market-acceptable speed and quality). That you could continue to push it and raise quality as you increased the amount of capital you had was a side-effect, and the various Japanese automakers demonstrated widely different commitments to it.

And I’m sure you know that he started formulating his ideas during the Great Depression and refined them while working on defense manufacturing in the US during WWII.

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

#166

Post by CuriouslyC »

monkeyelite wrote: post #162
CuriouslyC wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you don't have the ability complete any one of those tasks, you will be unable to complete the goal Nothing has changed. Few projects start with you knowing all the answers. In the same way AI can help you learn, you can learn from books, colleagues, and trial and error for tasks you do not know.

I can say from first hand experience that something has absolutely changed.

Before AI, if I had the knowledge/skill to do something on the large scale, but there were a bunch of minute/mundane details I had to figure out before solving the hard problems, I'd just lose steam from the boredom of it and go do something else. Now I delegate that stuff to AI. It isn't that I couldn't have learned how to do it, it's that I wouldn't have because it wouldn't be rewarding enough.

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

#167

Post by monkeyelite »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #166
monkeyelite wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't have the ability complete any one of those tasks, you will be unable to complete the goal Nothing has changed. Few projects start with you knowing all the answers. In the same way AI can help you learn, you can learn from books, colleagues, and trial and error for tasks you do not know.

I can say from first hand experience that something has absolutely changed. Before AI, if I had the knowledge/skill to do something on the large scale, but there were a bunch of minute/mundane details I had to figure out before solving the hard problems, I'd just lose steam from the boredom of it and go do something else. Now I delegate that stuff to AI. It isn't that I couldn't have learned how to do it, it's that I…

That’s great - you personally have found a tool that helps you overcome unknown problems. Other people have other methods for doing that. Maybe AI makes that more accessible in general.

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

#168

Post by altspace »

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 I took away from the article was that being good at code review makes the person better at guiding the agent to do the job, giving the right context and constraints at the right time… and not that the code reviewer has to fix whatever agent generated… this is also pretty close to my personal experience… LLM models are a bull which can be guided and definitely not a complete idiot…

In a strange kind of analogy, flowing water can cause a lot of damage.. but a dam built to the right specification and turbines can harness that for something very useful… the art is to learn how to build that dam

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

#169

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

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.

> 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.

I don't know how the US compares to other countries in terms of "insects per pound" standards, but having some level of insects is going to be inevitable.

For example, how could you guarantee that your wheat, pre-milling, has zero insects in it, or that your honey has no bee parts in it (best you can do is strain it, then anything that gets through the straining process will be on your toast).

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

#170

Post by insane_dreamer »

Two observations:

- If I had to iterate as much with a Jr dev as CC on not highly difficult stuff ("of course, I'll just do X!" then X doesn't work, then "of course, the answer is Y!" then Y doesn't work, etc.) I probably would have fired them by now or just say "never mind, I'll do it myself" .

- On the other hand a Jr dev will (hopefully) learn as they go, get better each time, so a month from now they're not making the same mistakes. An LLM can't learn so until there's a new model they keep making the same mistakes (yes, within a session they can learn -- if the session doesn't get too long -- but not across sessions). Also, the Jr dev can test their solution (which may require more than just running unit tests) and iterate on it so that they only come to me when it works and/or they're stuck. Just yesterday, on a rather simple matter, I wasted so much time telling the LLM "that didn't work, try again".

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