Or: As long as you have a good editor with endless time, a thousand monkeys with typewriters will reproduce Shakespeare.
If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents
31–40 of 203 posts
Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents
#32You review the code and found it broken. Then what? - Rewrite it yourself? - Tell AI to generate it again? — will lead to worse code than the first. - Write the long prompt (like 6 page) even longer and hope it works this time?
In my experience you tell the AI how to fix it and get better code based on your instructions.
Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents
#33Or: As long as you have a good editor with endless time, a thousand monkeys with typewriters will reproduce Shakespeare.
Username checks out.
Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents
#34My 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 implementations of one of the TODOs
10. I pick one and criticize it
11. Back to 9
I usually “snapshot” outputs along the way and return to them to reduce useless context.
This is what produces the most decent results for me, which aren’t spectacular but at the very least can be a baseline for my own implementation.
It’s very time consuming and 80% of the time I end up wondering if it would’ve been quicker to just do it all by myself right from the start.
Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents
#35I have received a few LLM produced PRs from peers from adjacent teams, in good faith but not familiar with the project, and they increasingly infuriate me. They were all garbage, but there’s a great asymmetry: it costs my peers nothing to generate them, it costs me precious time to refute them. And what can I do really? Saying “it’s irreparable garbage because the syntax might be right but it’s conceptually nonsense”…
If you had a colleague who was consistently writing complete shit you would raise it with your manager. This situation isn't all that different - the only complicating factor they're not on your team.
If it's only happened a few times you might first try setting some ground rules for contributions. Really common for innersource repos to have a CONTRIBUTING.md file or similar. Add a checkbox to your PR template that the dev has to check to indicate they've read it, then wait and see.
Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents
#36This 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…
It also assumes that people who are "good" at the standard code review process (which is tuned for reviewing code written by humans with some level of domain experience and thus finding human-looking mistakes) will be able to translate their skills perfectly to reviewing code written by AI. There have been plenty of examples where this review process was shown to be woefully insufficient for things outside of this scope (for instance, malicious patches like the bad patches scandal with Linux a few years ago or the xz backdoor were only discovered after the fact).
I haven't had to review too much AI code yet, but from what I've seen it tends to be the kind of code review that really requires you to think hard and so seems likely to lead to mistakes even with decent code reviewers. (I wouldn't say that I'm a brilliant code reviewer, but I have been doing open source maintenance full-time for around a decade at this point so I would say I have some experience with code reviews.)
Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents
#37This 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).
Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents
#38Getting AI to produce a bunch of code and then you having to filter through it all is a massive waste of time. The focus should be on getting AI to produce better code in the first place (e.g., using detailed plans), rather than on the volume of code you can produce... I have only had real advantages with AI for helping me plan changes, and for it helping me to review my code. Getting it to write code for me has been…
can I ask what language you are using AI for, there is also a difference in performance for AI in different languages
Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents
#39I love doing code review for colleagues since I know that it bolsters our shared knowledge, experience and standards. Code review for an external, stubborn, uncooperative AI? No thanks, that sounds like burnout.
Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents
#40[deleted]