Failures in production remain expensive.
Do they, though? AWS and CloudFlare recently had the worst outages in their history, and GitHub is flirting with zero nines of uptime these days. Doesn’t seem to have cost them any business.
Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap
31–40 of 82 posts
Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
The simple sentences LLM keep generating break my brain, it's like 95% of writing is now 3rd grade level. Compare that to e.g. Martin Amis: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Amis
> Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions. > Nowadays every business in America says how warm it is and how much it cares — loan companies, supermarkets, hamburger chains. Guess which one is AI and which one is a quote from Martin Amis.
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Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap
#33We faced a lot of this this year. Eager new joinees sent 100s of lines of CLs to review to "improve" little things.
Not only did the new changes did not fix what they thought it would fix but it broke other things in unexpected ways.
I brought in two changes after that:
* I'm not reviewing/reading anything that you yourself did not read / test in the target environments properly. If all it takes is an LLM prompt, I could be issuing the same prompt to make my life easier.. and If you're sending a CL, you should be owning the code you send.
* Me being more involved in the design process so review burden itself becomes lower. A bit of pair programming from time to time helped too.
Not sure how things will turn out after this but so far they seem better.
Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
The simple sentences LLM keep generating break my brain, it's like 95% of writing is now 3rd grade level. Compare that to e.g. Martin Amis: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Amis
That's not just you imagining things, that's the world around you changing. That's real and it matters.
You could even argue that it’s the load-bearing point!
Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap
#35> An LLM defaults to building when it should be buying. Not because it doesn’t know about existing libraries, it often mentions them, but because for an LLM, writing two hundred lines of implementation is the same cognitive effort as writing two lines of import.
Or maybe they are trained that way. It’s more tokens used and more money you need to pay.
Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap
#36Shouldn't we really consider review and rewrite together? If so, the economics may not change as drastically[1]. It's just like writing code by hand: we spend lots of time organizing our thoughts and examining our code, which is not that different from reviewing.
[1] Unless you're an engineer in Anthropic, so you just spend you time writing "loop".
Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap
#37> The shortest path for the model is to implement it completely
Have you worked with LLMs??????????? “I disabled the test so it’s not run so now all the tests pass” is not a hypothetical it’s pretty common. LLMs frequently do shortcut learning. The reason why reviews are expensive is because you still need to do all the steps in order to understand if a shortcut is justified.
Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap
#38[deleted]
Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The simple sentences LLM keep generating break my brain, it's like 95% of writing is now 3rd grade level. Compare that to e.g. Martin Amis: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Amis
That's not just you imagining things, that's the world around you changing. That's real and it matters.
So reading this, I know it’s probably a human posing as an LLM. But the problem with formats like this is that I don’t actually know.
If a human said this to me in real life, and I laughed, it would probably help build a connection with that person, as it’s signaling that we have in common an unusually strong grasp of the patterns in LLM output (unusually strong at least in comparison to the general population).
But here? I don’t gain anything by reading this comment. It only contributes to the uncertainty that anything I read on this site has any meaning at all.
Please, if you’re a human, don’t mimic LLMs on forums where the reader cannot distinguish you from an LLM without doing investigative work.
And you’re an LLM, please report to your owner that he is an ass for polluting one of the last bastions of high entropy discussion on the information superhighway.
Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap
#40> The shortest path for the model is to implement it completely Have you worked with LLMs??????????? “I disabled the test so it’s not run so now all the tests pass” is not a hypothetical it’s pretty common. LLMs frequently do shortcut learning. The reason why reviews are expensive is because you still need to do all the steps in order to understand if a shortcut is justified.
> “I disabled the test so it’s not run so now all the tests pass”
Also:
"I implemented it this terrible way because of precedence in the codebase...that I just wrote"
"I avoided implementing this correctly because of migration concern for existing installations of this code I'm writing right now"
"I deferred this critical feature for the future, so we can deploy quicker"
or, my favorite,
"I hand rolled an buggy http server because you said the tool should be self contained"