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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

#41

Post by bootsmann »

rollulus wrote: post #16

I 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”…

Nothing makes me hate AI more than getting a slop PR written by one of the agent-wielding coworkers with the comments describing what the next line does for every line. More often than not it looks plausible but turns out to be completely unusable upon closer inspection. Incredibly disrespectful to do this to your coworkers imo, its proper that you call it out.

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

#42

Post by aleph_minus_one »

QuantumNoodle wrote: post #10

Code review is part of the job, but one of the least enjoyable parts. Developers like _writing_ and that gives the most job satisfaction. AI tools are helpful, but inherently increases the amount of code we have to review with more scrutiny than my colleagues because of how unpredictable - yet convincing - it can be. Why did we create tools that do the fun part and increase the non-fun part? Where are the "code-revie…

> Code review is part of the job, but one of the least enjoyable parts. Developers like _writing_ and that gives the most job satisfaction.

At least for me, what gives the most satisfaction (even though this kind of satisfaction happens very rarely) if I discover some very elegant structure behind whatever has to be implemented that changes the whole way how you thought about programming (oroften even about life) for decades.

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

#43

Post by shakna »

simonw wrote: post #20
glimshe wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'd actually have a use for an AI that could receive my empty public APIs (such as a C++ header file) as an input and produce a first rough implementation. Maybe this exists already, I don't know because I haven't done any serious vibe coding.

The leading models have been very good at this for over a year now. Try copying one your existing C++ header files into GPT-5 or Claude 4 or Gemini 2.5 as an experiment and see how they do.

They certainly invent new functions whenever I try.

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

#44

Post by nurettin »

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…

I went from ";" to fully working C++ production grade code with good test coverage. To my estimation, 90% of the work was done in an agent prompt. It was a side project, now it will be my job. The process is like they described.

For the core parts you cannot let go of the reins. You have to keep steering it. You have to take short breaks and reload the code into the agent as it starts acting confused. But once you get the hang of it, things that would take you months of convincing yourself and picking yourself back up to continue becomes a day's work.

Once you have a decent amount of work done, you can have the agent read your code as documentation and use it to develop further.

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

#45

Post by swaptr »

AI-generated code can be useful in the early stages of a project, but it raises concerns in mature ones. Recently, a 280kloc+ Postgres parser was merged into Multigres (https://github.com/multigres/multigres/pull/109) with no public code review. In open source, this is worrying. Many people rely on these projects for learning and reference. Without proper review, AI-generated code weakens their value as teaching tools, and more importantly the trust in pulling as dependencies. Code review isn’t just about bugs, it’s how contributors learn, understand design choices, and build shared knowledge. The issue isn’t speed of building software (although corporations may seem to disagree), but how knowledge is passed on.

Edit: Reference to the time it took to open the PR: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sougou_the-largest-multigres-...

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

#46

Post by jmull »

> In my view, the best code review is structural. It brings in context from parts of the codebase that the diff didn’t mention.

That may be true for AI code.

But it would be pretty terrible for human-written code to bring this up after the code is written, wasting hours/days effort for lack of a little up-front communication on design.

AI makes routine code generation cheap -- only seconds/minutes and cents are being wasted -- but you essentially still need that design session.

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

#47

Post by lapcat »

phito wrote: post #15
QuantumNoodle wrote: post #10

Code review is part of the job, but one of the least enjoyable parts. Developers like _writing_ and that gives the most job satisfaction. AI tools are helpful, but inherently increases the amount of code we have to review with more scrutiny than my colleagues because of how unpredictable - yet convincing - it can be. Why did we create tools that do the fun part and increase the non-fun part? Where are the "code-revie…

Because the goal of "AI" is not to have fun, it's to solve problems and increase productivity. I have fun programming too, but you have to realize the world isn't optimizing make things more fun.

> you have to realize the world isn't optimizing make things more fun.

Serious question: why not?

IMO it should be.

If "progress" is making us all more miserable, then what's the point? Shouldn't progress make us happier?

It feels like the endgame of AI is that the masses slave away for the profit of a few tech overlords.

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

#48

Post by Manfred »

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…

Reviewing code from less experienced or unmotivated people is also very taxing, both in a cognitive and emotional sense. It will never approach a really good level of quality because you just give up after 4 rounds of reviews on the same feature.

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

#49

Post by jmull »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #28
vrighter wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think it's that simple. Fundamentally, unit tests are using the same system to write your invariants twice, it just so happens that they're different enough that failure in one tends to reveal a bug in another. You can't reasonably state this won't be the case with tools built for code review until the failure cases are examined. Furthermore a simple way to help get around this is by writing code with one pro…

> unit tests are using the same system to write your invariants twice

For unit tests, the parts of the system that are the same are not under test, while the parts that are different are under test.

The problem with using AI to review AI is that what you're checking is the same as what you're checking it with. Checking the output of one LLM with another brand probably helps, but they may also have a lot of similarities, so it's not clear how much.

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

#50

Post by cindyllm »

lapcat wrote: post #47
phito wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the goal of "AI" is not to have fun, it's to solve problems and increase productivity. I have fun programming too, but you have to realize the world isn't optimizing make things more fun.

> you have to realize the world isn't optimizing make things more fun. Serious question: why not? IMO it should be. If "progress" is making us all more miserable, then what's the point? Shouldn't progress make us happier? It feels like the endgame of AI is that the masses slave away for the profit of a few tech overlords.

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