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Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap

#41

Post by rogerrogerr »

gobdovan wrote: post #27
netsharc wrote: post #12

Earlier 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.

Without looking, I’m guessing one of these was cherry-picked from Amis and one was plucked nearly at random from LinkedIn.

The writing style AI uses has its place, but not as _every sentence_. That’s what is exasperating. At the same time, I’m happy that I can still at least identify AI prose of more-than-trivial length.

Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap

#43

Post by drudolph914 »

I’ve personally reached a point where if I’m saving time typing, but gaining back that time on reviewing and understanding, I may as well have just written the code most of the time. AI is great for boilerplate and learning, but my team has given up on trying to use the tool for entire implementations

Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap

#44

Post by bcrosby95 »

usernametaken29 wrote: post #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.

I used Fable to write a relatively small RPG. In the span of 2 hours it managed to do many interesting things. My favorite was when it wrote code with a race condition that could cause people to take more damage than they should, which it then defended as an acceptable tradeoff for parallelism.

Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap

#45

Post by bot403 »

nomel wrote: post #40
usernametaken29 wrote: post #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.

> “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…

Or bizarrely Claude askes about code churn like it matters.

Human, Do you want me to do it the right way? It will cause code churn in 90 files. Or I can take a shortcut and edit 3 files in a terrible way.

Edits 90 files for 12 lines each in 25 seconds...

Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap

#46

Post by bartvk »

latentsea wrote: post #29
netsharc wrote: post #12

Earlier 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.

Please add a /s if appropriate.

Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap

#47

Post by SCdF »

> LLMs aren’t lazy. They don’t cut corners because a simpler solution feels good enough. If they know how to solve something thoroughly, they will.

I don't know why they think this, but no? Perhaps it's badly expressed, but LLMs cut corners all the time. It's sort of their core fault really.

Anyway, I disagree with the core premise[1]. Re-writes are not cheap, because 1) code can be so bad it's unclear how to rewrite it[2], b) code can be so significant it's challenging to rewrite it (architectural choices, schemas, etc), and lastly if you're ever wanting to own your own code and not rent it from LLM companies, having it understandable by a human is still a goal worth working toward.

[1] To be fair, I think OP _might_ be talking about rewriting in the moment of the thing being built, but with some unspoken rule that once they think the change is good enough, then they are reviewing all the code? They don't make it clear..

[2] it's not even that hard. Write a test that exercises an end result and not the rule that causes that end result and 6 months later you've forgotten why the code is like that. I had to maintain a piece of software once where the primary form of tests were a bunch of snapshots of an end report being generated, based on some initial data input, mostly all unlabeled. The code was like "do this SQL query on table A and then take the second result". Why the second result? Your guess is as good as mine! I couldn't even work out why they were querying table A and not table B...

Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap

#48

Post by tobyhinloopen »

bot403 wrote: post #45
nomel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “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…

Or bizarrely Claude askes about code churn like it matters. Human, Do you want me to do it the right way? It will cause code churn in 90 files. Or I can take a shortcut and edit 3 files in a terrible way. Edits 90 files for 12 lines each in 25 seconds...

“This is a significant rewrite that will take weeks”

Done after my potty break

Re: Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap

#49

Post by simianwords »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #11
simianwords wrote: post #2

Why is reviewing hard? I use LLMs for reviewing. It is dogmatic to review every line written by an LLM.

LLM's are good at some types of reviews and awful at others. They generally tend to overcomplicate things and miss opportunities to simplify. They pretty much have to take pre-existing code and tests as gospel and cannot distinguish which is buggy, incomplete, unimportant or important. They have no knowledge of unwritten business requirements, customer preferences, et cetera so high level review is always necessary.

Yeah ok but that’s what I have. I have the knowledge of unwritten business requirements and customer preferences.

My knowledge + Claude is much better than just my knowledge.

I don’t know why it is considered strange to use both tools (my knowledge plus Claude) to make reviews go quicker. In fact it is highly dogmatic to not use Claude while reviewing.

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