Expert reviews are just about the only thing that makes AI generated code viable, though doing them after the fact is a bit sketchy, to be efficient you kinda need to keep an eye on what the model is doing as its working. Unchecked, AI models output code that is as buggy as it is inefficient. In smaller green field contexts, it's not so bad, but in a large code base, it's performs much worse as it will not have acces…
If you spend 5-15x the time reviewing what the LLM is doing, are you saving any time by using it?
Some, but not very much. Writing code is hard. Ai will do a lot of tedious code that you procrastinate writing.
The only way to see the kinds of speed-up companies want from these things, right now, is to do way too little review. I think we're going to see a lot of failures in a lot of sectors where companies set goals for reduced hours on various things they do, based on what they expected from LLM speed-ups, and it will have turned out the only way to hit those goals was by spending way too little time reviewing LLM output.…
So will it turn out that actually writing code was never the time sink in the first place? That has always been my feeling. Once I really understand what I need to implement, the code is the easy part. Sure it takes some time, but it's not the majority. And for me, actually writing the code will often trigger some additional insight or awareness of edge cases that I hadn't considered.
"So will it turn out that actually writing code was never the time sink in the first place?"
Of course it wasn't! Do you think people can envision the right objects to produce all the time? Yeah.. we have a lot of Steve Jobs walking around lol.
As you say, there's 'other stuff' that happens naturally during the production process that add value.
> The response for now? Junior and mid-level engineers can no longer push AI-assisted code without a senior signing off. So basically, kill the productivity of senior engineers, kill the ability for junior engineers to learn anything, and ensure those senior engineers hate their jobs. Bold move, we'll see how that goes.
Juniors could just code things the old fashioned way. It isn't hard. And if they do find it too hard, they aren't cut out for this job.
But aren’t companies enforcing AI usage? If noy, wait for it
Anyone work with Kiro before? As I understood, it was held as an INTERNAL USE ONLY tool for much longer than expected.
I used Kiro IDE and really liked it. The all you can eat model of LLM usage is very tempting compared to say Cursor. The features in the editor are basically the same.
Reviewing AI generated code at PR time is a bottleneck. It cancels most of the benefits senior leadership thinks AI offers (delivery speed). There’s also this implicit imbalance engineers typically don’t like: it takes me 10 min to submit a complete feature thanks to Claude… but for the human reviewing my PR in a manual way it will take them 10-20 times that. Edit: at the end real engineers know that what takes effor…
This is what I don't understand about this policy. There's no way a senior has enough spare capacity to be the gate keeper on every PR made by AI below them. So now we are just making it so the senior people use more AI to keep up but now they're to blame for letting it happen.
It sounds like a piss poor deal for seniors unless senior engineer now means professional code reviewer.
Expert reviews are just about the only thing that makes AI generated code viable, though doing them after the fact is a bit sketchy, to be efficient you kinda need to keep an eye on what the model is doing as its working. Unchecked, AI models output code that is as buggy as it is inefficient. In smaller green field contexts, it's not so bad, but in a large code base, it's performs much worse as it will not have acces…
If you spend 5-15x the time reviewing what the LLM is doing, are you saving any time by using it?
No, but that's the crux of the AI problem in software. Time to write code was never the bottleneck. AI is most useful for learning, either via conversation or by seeing examples. It makes writing code faster too, but only a little after you take into account review. The cases where it shines are high-profile and exciting to managers, but not common enough to make a big difference in practice. E.g AI can one-shot a script to get logs from a paginated API, convert it to ndjson, and save to files grouped by week, with minimal code review, but only if I'm already experienced enough to describe those requirements, and, most importantly, that's not what I'm doing every day anyway.
>Junior and mid-level engineers can no longer push AI-assisted code without a senior signing off Review by a senior is one of the biggest "silver bullet" illusions managers suffer from. For a person (senior or otherwise) to examine code or configuration with the granularity required to verify that it even approximates the result of their own level of experience, even only in terms of security/stability/correctness, r…
> requires an amount of time approaching the time spent if they had just done it themselves It's actually often harder to fix something sloppy than to write it from scratch. To fix it, you need to hold in your head both the original, the new solution, and calculate the difference, which can be very confusing. The original solution can also anchor your thinking to some approach to the problem, which you wouldn't have…
Sloppy code that has been around for a while works. It likely has support for edge cases you forgot about. Often the sloppyness is because of those edge cases.