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-​-dangerously-skip-reading-code

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Re: -​-dangerously-skip-reading-code

#161

Post by Npovview »

ekidd wrote: post #157
Npovview wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about the artifacts that were supposed to test the correctness of the code? are they passing willy nilly?

No amount of testing will save a large program with a dogshit architecture. Roughly, this is because tests increase coverage linearly with the number of tests, but weird interactions increase exponentially with code size. This might be fine if you're building a tiny app, or if you're building a medium-sized app that follows a strict existing architecture (like a web app consisting mostly of forms). In which case, hav…

Would Antirez with LLMs make the same mistakes a novice would make? You are comparing your strongest contender with my weakest contender.

Re: -​-dangerously-skip-reading-code

#162

Post by MrScruff »

rspeele wrote: post #122
alabut wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simon Willison made a similar parallel recently: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/6/vibe-coding-and-agentic... “The thing that really helps me is thinking back to when I’ve worked at larger organizations where I’ve been an engineering manager. Other teams are building software that my team depends on. If another team hands over something and says, “hey, this is the image resize service, here’s how to use it to resi…

Suppose the image resize service has some caching, and due to a bug in the caching, under certain circumstances it will respond with an already-cached resized version of a different source image. Let's say for example it caches on something stupid like the CRC32 of the input image -- good enough that the couple dozen images in your test dataset don't collide, you don't see it in smoke testing your app, but real world…

Practically, this is just about confidence values, anticipated blast radius and balancing testing vs review overhead.

Re: -​-dangerously-skip-reading-code

#163

Post by distances »

stuaxo wrote: post #152
kenhwang wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wondered why people don't also ask the AI to generate code comments/documentation, summaries of those documentation, overview of the system, and re-review them all for correctness for the changes they asked the AI to do. What I've noticed reviewing all my colleagues' AI generated code PRs is: it really is just code, and the rare comment here and there is still added by the human. We're already trying to ligh…

You get LLMs like Gemini that will assure you they are right. There seems to be a big push for 0 reviewing, which is insane.

The review needs to be done with clear context, or another LLM altogether.

Re: -​-dangerously-skip-reading-code

#164

Post by ekidd »

theshrike79 wrote: post #160
ekidd wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No amount of testing will save a large program with a dogshit architecture. Roughly, this is because tests increase coverage linearly with the number of tests, but weird interactions increase exponentially with code size. This might be fine if you're building a tiny app, or if you're building a medium-sized app that follows a strict existing architecture (like a web app consisting mostly of forms). In which case, hav…

> those tools are some of the worst software I've used in my life Is the code bad or don't they do what they claim they do? Both are very different issues.

They do what they claim to do maybe 20% of the time. The other 80% of the time is spent trying to figure out why they aren't working, why they corrupted their data, why they crash every 10 minutes, etc.

And I want to be clear that this isn't some non-technical novice vibe coding this garbage. This is often extremely talented developers with decades of experience who have apparently decided that they don't need to look at their code anymore.

You can get very good results out of AI agents. But mostly the people who get good results are the ones who still read the LLM output in detail, and who introduce the structure the LLMs are missing. But like I said, this distinction mostly becomes apparent past a certain size and novelty level.

Re: -​-dangerously-skip-reading-code

#165

Post by gcr »

sokoloff wrote: post #154
khasan222 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure every time you use ai you’re sacrificing understanding if you don’t plan out and understand how exactly the ai is going to do the work you asked it to do. The same output that is such a bad thing in this article can also be used to gain context, by making a thorough plan with your ai first, reading through the plan and proposing changes just like you would with a real developer. You can also use this output…

I think most people test at least a happy path of their code end to end. I think we can all agree that your last sentence is far more aspirational than bare minimum standard practice. (“I believe we should be spending our energy thoroughly manually testing a feature to make sure when we brainstormed we actually did get every edge case, and it works well.”) I did one small side web project by only writing spec tests a…

What does “much better tested” mean to you?

If you don’t read the tests to check they confer your intent or specifications, they’re more like tautologies than tests, you know?

Re: -​-dangerously-skip-reading-code

#166

Post by nlitened »

I feel like people who program in JavaScript or whose projects pull megabytes of dependencies, don’t get a moral right to complain about this. You guys just sit and calm down this time, you already said what you could.

Your app takes 20 seconds to load, pulling 50 megabytes of minified JS. Your backend is a mess of 20 Rust microservices, 300 megabytes docker image each.

Nobody has actually been reading and understanding code in your org for the past 15 years. And nobody has ever been responsible, everybody has just been job hopping for a 15% total comp bump.

Now the secret is out.

Re: -​-dangerously-skip-reading-code

#167

Post by steinnes »

ossopite wrote: post #158
kenhwang wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wondered why people don't also ask the AI to generate code comments/documentation, summaries of those documentation, overview of the system, and re-review them all for correctness for the changes they asked the AI to do. What I've noticed reviewing all my colleagues' AI generated code PRs is: it really is just code, and the rare comment here and there is still added by the human. We're already trying to ligh…

The docs/summaries part I can get behind if reviewed and improved by a human, but at least when working in pre-existing codebases, I tend to steer models away from writing comments, because I find that almost all comments they write are "not even wrong". That is: they either reiterate what the code does, or would if the code were slightly clearer, or they tell half truths that are more confusing than helpful. Mostly…

100% agree. 95% of the AI comments I see are redundant, misleading or both. Commonly they feel like the reasoning process leaking into code.

Re: -​-dangerously-skip-reading-code

#168

Post by sokoloff »

gcr wrote: post #165
sokoloff wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people test at least a happy path of their code end to end. I think we can all agree that your last sentence is far more aspirational than bare minimum standard practice. (“I believe we should be spending our energy thoroughly manually testing a feature to make sure when we brainstormed we actually did get every edge case, and it works well.”) I did one small side web project by only writing spec tests a…

What does “much better tested” mean to you? If you don’t read the tests to check they confer your intent or specifications, they’re more like tautologies than tests, you know?

I don't understand the comment.

I wrote the tests. That was how I expressed the spec and my intentions.

Re: -​-dangerously-skip-reading-code

#169

Post by skydhash »

LtWorf wrote: post #156
npodbielski wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It would be like buying a car that you have no idea about the engine and gearbox and kind of fuel it is using or if at all. It have four wheels and and it can drive you from point A to B. Sure but sometimes it happens that some particular brands and they particular model requires engine renovation after 100k km because it is so shitty design. Right now we are just starting vibe coded software, nobody knows how i…

The problem is that you cannot just throw away your data.

People are so focused on code they forget that the actual values is data. We create software to transform data from what we have to what we want. A software that can’t do it or, worse, corrupt the data, is worthless.
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