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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

#71

Post by roenxi »

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…

The issue with the hypothetical is if you give a team lead 25 competent people they'd also get bad results. Or at least, the "team lead" isn't really leading their team on technical matters apart from fighting off the odd attempt to migrate to MongoDB and hoping that their people are doing the right thing. The sweet spot for teams is 3-6 people and someone more interested in empire building than technical excellence can handle maybe around 9 people and still do a competent job. It doesn't depend much on the quality of the people.

The way team leads seem to get used is people who are good at code get a little more productive as more people are told to report to them. What is happening now is the senior-level engineers all automatically get the same option: a team of 1-2 mid-level engineers on the cheap thanks to AI which is entirely manageable. And anyone less capable gets a small team, a rubber duck or a mentor depending on where they fall vs LLM use.

Of course, the real question is what will happen as the AIs get into the territory traditionally associated with 130+ IQ ranges and the engineers start to sort out how to give them a bit more object persistence.

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

#72

Post by skydhash »

jmcodes wrote: post #55
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…

Maybe I'm weird but I don't actually enjoy the act of _writing_ code. I enjoy problem solving and creating something. I enjoy decomposing systems and putting them back together in a better state, but actually manually typing out code isn't something I enjoy. When I use an LLM to code I feel like I can go from idea to something I can work with in much less time than I would have normally. Our codebase is more type-saf…

Code is the ultimate fact checker, where what you write is what gets done. Specs are well written wishes.

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

#73

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

The title of this article seems way too glib.

Code review isn't the same as design review, nor are these the only type of things (coding and design) that someone may be trying to use AI for.

If you are going to use AI, and catch it's mistakes, then you need to have expertise in whatever it is you are using the AI for. Even if we limit the discussion just to coding, then being a good code reviewer isn't enough - you'd need to have skill at whatever you are asking the AI to do. One of the valuable things AI can do is help you code using languages and frameworks you are not familiar with, which then of course means you are not going to be competent to review the output, other than in most generic fashion.

A bit off topic, but it's weird to me to see the term "coding" make a comeback in this AI/LLM era. I guess it is useful as a way to describe what AI is good at - coding vs more general software developer, but how many companies nowadays hire coders as opposed to software developers (I know it used to be a thing with some big companies like IBM)? Rather than compartmentalized roles, it seems the direction nowadays is more expecting developers to be able to do everything from business analysis and helping develop requirements, to architecture/design and then full-stack development, and subsequent production support.

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

#74

Post by moffkalast »

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…

> Sure, it’ll produce endless broken nonsense, but as long as someone is checking, it’s fine

Well you've just described an EKF on a noisy sensor.

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

#75

Post by carlmr »

fhd2 wrote: post #14
lapcat wrote: post #9

If you are good at code review, you will also be good at not using AI agents.

This. Having had the pleasure to review the work and fix the bugs of agent jockeys (generally capable developers that fell in love with Claude Code et al), I'm rather sceptical. The code often looks as if they were on mushrooms. They cannot reason about it whatsoever, like they weren't even involved, when I know they weren't completely hands off. I really believe there are people out there that produce good code with…

>The code often looks as if they were on mushrooms. They cannot reason about it whatsoever

Interesting comparison, why not weed or alcohol?

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

#76

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

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…

Right, this is the exact opposite of the best practices that Edward Deming helped develop in Japan, then brought to the west.

Quality needs to come from the process, not the people.

Choosing to use a process known to be flawed, then hoping that people will catch the mistakes, doesn't seem like a great idea if the goal is quality.

The trouble is that LLMs can be used in many ways, but only some of those ways play to their strengths. Management have fantasies of using AI for everything, having either failed to understand what it is good for, or failed to learn the lessons of Japan/Deming.

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

#77

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

gus_massa wrote: post #67
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'm not sure about the current state of the art, but microprocessors production is (was?) very bad. You make a lot of them in a single silicon wafer, and then test them thoughtfully until you find the few that are good. You drop all the defective ones because they are very cheap piece of sand and charge a lot for the ones that works correctly to cover all the costs. I'm not sure how this translates to programming, co…

Design for test is still a major part of (high volume) chip design. Anything that can't be tested in seconds on wafer is basically worthless for mass production.

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

#78

Post by jvanderbot »

codingdave wrote: post #70
brap wrote: post #34

My process is basically 1. Give it requirements 2. Tell it to ask me clarifying questions 3. When no more questions, ask it to explain the requirements back to me in a formal PRD 4. I criticize it 5. Tell it to come up with 2 alternative high level designs 6. I pick one and criticize it 7. Tell it to come up with 2 alternative detailed TODO lists 8. I pick one and criticize it 9. Tell it to come up with 2 alternative…

Definitely sounds slower than doing it yourself. I am falling into a pattern of treating AI coding like a drunk mid-level dev: "I saw those few paragraphs of notes you wrote up on a napkin, and stayed up late Saturday night while drinking and spat out this implementation. you like?" So I can say to myself, "No, do not like. But the overall gist at least started in the right direction, so I can revise it from here and…

The most useful thing I've found is "I need to do X, show me 3 different popular libraries that do it". I've really limited my AI use to "Lady's Illustrated Primer" especially after some bad experiences with AI code from devs who should know better.

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

#79

Post by Demiurge »

jmull wrote: post #49
bcrosby95 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 similariti…

What if you use a different AI model? Sometimes just a different seed generates a different result. I notice there is a benefit to seeing and contrasting the different answers. The improvement is gradual, it’s not a binary.

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

#80

Post by karmakaze »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #73

The title of this article seems way too glib. Code review isn't the same as design review, nor are these the only type of things (coding and design) that someone may be trying to use AI for. If you are going to use AI, and catch it's mistakes, then you need to have expertise in whatever it is you are using the AI for. Even if we limit the discussion just to coding, then being a good code reviewer isn't enough - you'd…

Seems so.

> Using AI agents correctly is a process of reviewing code. [...]

> Why is that? Large language models are good at producing a lot of code, but they don’t yet have the depth of judgement of a competent software engineer. Left unsupervised, they will spend a lot of time committing to bad design decisions.

Obviously you want to make course corrections sooner than later. Same as I would do with less experienced devs, talk through the high level operations, then the design/composition. Reviewing a large volume of unguided code is like waiting for 100k tokens to be written only to correct the premise in the first 100 and start over.

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