Earlier quoted context omitted.
He isn’t shipping anything. Asking for code review is not shipping. This is the complaint: > he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. He has traded readability for volume. The lack of readability is causing him to ship less. This was a bad trade because the readability is the bottleneck not the code creation. He should improve readability.
>> the readability is the bottleneck not the code creation. He should improve readability. See this is where I think LLMs can actually improve software engineering. Use them to write better code not more code. The most useful LLM at work so far is the code review bot that occasionally finds things that I missed even with a careful self review and good test coverage. We should be prompting the LLMs to review our hand…
If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
511–520 of 551 posts
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#512A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…
As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that…
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
It appears that either answer would be accepted, and so I'm fine with it. If it really is there is one correct answer then I'm against this. This feels like a problem where a good enough solution can be done in the time of an interview if you do it by hand (though if anyone knows about dates they will expect there is a lifetime of fixing special cases left if you don't use the library) I prefer fizz-buzz as a questio…
I mean, any answer is "accepted" in the sense that the whole point is to let me see how you think about solving simple problems. What has been distressing is seeing the number of applicants who can't even try , when it's the trying I want to see.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that…
> Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. Then don't review the code. Ask Agents to review and merge it, also shift the responsibilities to the AI agents as well. If you think human is a bottleneck, then either optimize for humans, or remove humans. What's the problem?
That's not gonna fly most of the time.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#515A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…
I often hear people say lately, "why should I bother to read this, if you didn't even think it was worth writing?" I've been thinking about this in art. Is it the end result that matters, or the process of creating it? I once saw a hideous sculpture. Didn't like it at all. Then the video zoomed and I saw that the whole thing (quite massive) had been hand-built out of individual toothpicks, and suddenly I thought it w…
Before I starting reading something to understand it, I want to have a sense that it is likely going to be worth my time and effort in the end. The more time and effort the author has put into the piece, the more likely it is that it will be worthwhile to read it.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#516A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…
I often hear people say lately, "why should I bother to read this, if you didn't even think it was worth writing?" I've been thinking about this in art. Is it the end result that matters, or the process of creating it? I once saw a hideous sculpture. Didn't like it at all. Then the video zoomed and I saw that the whole thing (quite massive) had been hand-built out of individual toothpicks, and suddenly I thought it w…
What is the "end result" you're talking about here?
Programs are complex beasts, you cannot just quickly look at them and get an idea of what's they are actually doing. You might look at the behavior of the program in some limited circumstances, but that will make you blind to all the other situations where bugs will likely hide! In the end a code review is looking at what the "end result" is, and it requires quite a lot of effort!
So without knowing what the end result is, how can you justify the effort for such code review? And that's where the process comes in, as an indicator of what to expect.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that…
> As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans Prolific humans should scale to the review/test/QA/staging backpressure - not just push to have whatever they produce accepted. Prolific is not a badge of honor, and "lines of code" is not a quality metric.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even before AI, I've worked with people who would produce a huge wall of code and ask for review, and sometimes that code was completely off base or needed a significant rework. I would always feel bad in those cases, because it's clear they spent a lot of time, and I'm going to have to say "no" and they will feel like they wasted a ton of effort. The thought process around this has started shifting for me in the las…
If they put effort into the code- they will put effort into guiding the reviewer through it. Like : Here is the ticket, this was the goal. I set out by beginning here- but encountered problems x y z I then refactored to accomplish. Finally.. You just dont drop a blob from orbit. Ironically, ai could generate that quite well from existing documentation (ticket, tasks and prompts) + https://marketplace.visualstudio.com…
Not sure how you are working but we have this novelty idea where people have daily meetings like 15 mins each day to update each other which tasks they are busy with.
We also have refinement meetings where people are involved in clarification for each task so they are not surprised by requirements.
So we do planning meetings every two weeks. Each ticket is tied to the code in commit.
So by code review time anyone doing CR has all of the information in few clicks and some of it already in their head.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
These kinds of principles are sensible at their core, and I am a big proponent of the mindset, but the main problem as a sibling comment pointed out in a way is that this assumes that everyone is striving for an honest and accurate correlation between display of effort and value, and that everyone is looking deep enough into and behind that display to recognize the true value behind it. But actual effort, let alone v…
an honest and accurate correlation between display of effort and value Hmmm. Your choice of words here has just sparked a realization for me. Before you said this, I was completely on board with the original post. But in juxtaposing effort with value, it illustrates that we're basing the idea on the Labor Theory of Value. That idea seems intuitive, and Adam Smith wrote about it 250 years ago. But it turns out that LT…
For instance, you can put a lot of effort into something, without creating any value for yourself or for others. But it is often true that things of utility need a sufficient amount of compounded effort behind them before they become valuable, otherwise they are common and easy to obtain. Value is necessarily relative.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
an honest and accurate correlation between display of effort and value Hmmm. Your choice of words here has just sparked a realization for me. Before you said this, I was completely on board with the original post. But in juxtaposing effort with value, it illustrates that we're basing the idea on the Labor Theory of Value. That idea seems intuitive, and Adam Smith wrote about it 250 years ago. But it turns out that LT…
Use value or exchange value?