Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

seangoedecke.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 203 posts

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

#81

Post by jvanderbot »

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…

What happens is a kind of feeling of developing a meta skill. It's tempting to believe the scope of what you can solve has expanded when you are self-assessed as "good" with AI.

Its the same with any "general" tech. I've seen it since genetic algorithms were all the rage. Everyone reaches for the most general tool, then assumes everything that tool might be used for is now a problem or domain they are an expert in, with zero context into that domain. AI is this times 100x, plus one layer more meta, as you can optimize over approaches with zero context.

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

#82

Post by ben_w »

vrighter wrote: post #25
simonw wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where are the "code-review" agents at? OpenAI's Codex Cloud just added a new feature for code review, and their new GPT-5-Codex model has been specifically trained for code review: https://openai.com/index/introducing-upgrades-to-codex/ Gemini and Claude both have code review features that work via GitHub Actions: https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/docs/review... and https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/cl…

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

Weirdly, you can not only do this, it somehow does actually catch some of its own mistakes.

Not all of the mistakes, they generally still have a performance ceiling less than human experts (though even this disclaimer is still simplifying), but this kind of self-critique is basically what makes the early "reasoning" models one up over simple chat models: for the first-n :END: tokens, replace with "wait" and see it attempt other solutions and pick something usually better.

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

#83

Post by jmcodes »

skydhash wrote: post #72
jmcodes wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, hence tests, linters, and actually verifying the changes it is making. You can't trust anything the LLM writes. It will hallucinate or misunderstand something at some point if your task gets long. But that's not the point, I'm not asking it to solve things for me.

I'm using it to get faster at building my own understanding of the problem, what needs to get done, and then just executing the rote steps I've already figured out.

Sometimes I get lucky and the feature is well defined enough just from the context gathering step that the implementation is literally just be hitting the enter key as I read the edits it wants to make.

Sometimes I have to interrupt it and guide it a bit more as it works.

Sometimes I realize I misunderstood something as it's thinking about what it needs to do.

One-shotting or asking the LLM to think for you is the worst way to use them.

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

#84

Post by Leynos »

rco8786 wrote: post #69
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…

> It’s very time consuming and 80% of the time I end up wondering if it would’ve been quicker to just do it all by myself right from the start. Yes, this. Every time I read these sort of step by step guides to getting the best results with coding agents it all just sounds like boatloads of work that erase the efficiency margins that AI is supposed to bring in the first place. And anecdotally, I've found that to be tr…

At least for me, I can have five of these processes running at once. I can also use Deepresearch for generating the designs with a survey of literature. I can use NotebookLM to analyse the designs. And I use Sourcery, CodeRabbit, Codex and Codescene together to do code review.

It took me a long time to get there with custom cli tools and browser userscripts. The out of the box tooling is very limited unless you are willing to pay big £££s for Devin or Blitzy.

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

#85

Post by bluefirebrand »

nkmnz wrote: post #37
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…

> This idea that you can get good results from a bad process This idea is called "evolution"... > as long as you have good quality control ...and it's QA is death on every single level of the systems: cell, organism, species, and ecosystem. You must consider that those devs or companies with not-good-enough QA will end up dead (from a business perspective).

So we're software evolvers now, not engineers?

Sounds like a stupid path forward to me

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

#86

Post by ben_w »

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 don’t know of any case where it has really worked out.

Supermarket vegetables.

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

#87

Post by bluefirebrand »

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…

> I really believe there are people out there that produce good code with these things, but all I've seen so far has been tragic

I don't believe this at all, because all I've seen so far is tragic

I would need to see any evidence of good quality work coming from AI assisted devs before I start to entertain the idea myself. So far all I see is low effort low quality code that the dev themself is unable to reason about

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

#88

Post by thunky »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #76
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 t…

> 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.

You're also describing the software development process prior to LLMs. Otherwise code reviews wouldn't exist.

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

#89

Post by jaredcwhite »

Sorry, this is not the profession of programming, and people in the near future will be looking back at this era and laughing their asses off.

But not me, because I will never touch an agentic tool. And believe me, I have a big smile on my face. Life is good! =D

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

#90

Post by tempodox »

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…

> … good results from a bad process …

Even if the process weren’t technically bad, it would still be shit. Doing code review with a human has meaning in that the human will probably learn something, and it’s an investment in the future. Baby-sitting an LLM, however, is utterly meaningless.

Post reply on HN