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When AI writes the software, who verifies it?

leodemoura.github.io

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Re: When AI writes the software, who verifies it?

#91

Post by sjajzh »

cesarb wrote: post #76
throwaw12 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am saying PRs I get are around 60-70 lines of change, which is small enough to be considered as single unit (add to this unit tests which must pass with new change, so we are talking about 30 line change + 30 line unit test) But when looking at the PR changes, you don't always see whole picture because review subjects (code lines) are scattered across files and methods, and GitHub also shows methods and files parti…

> Its difficult problem, because even if GitHub shows whole body of the updated method or a file, you still don't see grand picture. > For example: A (calls) -> B -> C -> D > And you made changes in D, how do you know the side effect on B, what if it broke A? That's poor encapsulation. If the changes in D respect its contract, and C respects D's contract, your changes in D shouldn't affect C, much less B or A.

Leaky abstractions are a thing. You can just encapsulate your way out of everything.

Re: When AI writes the software, who verifies it?

#92

Post by throwaw12 »

sjajzh wrote: post #90
throwaw12 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are not wrong, but solution you are proposing is just throttling the system because of the bottleneck, and it doesn't solve the bottleneck problem.

You know we’ve had the ability to generate large amounts of code for a long time, right? You could have been drowning in reviews in 2018. Cheap devs are not new. There’s a reason this trend never caught on for any decent company.

I hope you are not bot, because your account was created just 8 minutes ago.

> You know we’ve had the ability to generate large amounts of code for a long time, right?

No, I was not aware. Nothing comes close to the scale of 'coherent looking' code generation of today's tech.

Even if you employ 100K people and ask them to write proper if/else code non-stop, LLM can still outcompete them by a huge margin with much better looking code.

(don't compare it LLM output to codegen of the past, because codegen was carefully crafted and a lot of times were deterministic, I am only talking about people writing code vs LLMs writing code)

Re: When AI writes the software, who verifies it?

#93

Post by bunderbunder »

daveguy wrote: post #28
Avshalom wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's a problem the software industry has been building for itself for decades. Software has, since at least the adoption of "agile" created an industry culture of not just refusing to build to specs but insisting that specs are impossible to get from a customer.

Agile hasn't been insisting that specs are impossible to get from a customer. They have been insisting that getting specs from a customer is best performed as a dynamic process. In my opinion, that's one of agile's most significant contributions. It lines up with a learning process that doesn't assume the programmer or the customer knows the best course ahead of time.

I have found that it works well as an open-endlessly dynamic process when you are doing the kind of work that the people who came up with Scrum did as their bread and butter: limited-term contract jobs that were small enough to be handled by a single pizza-sized team and whose design challenges mostly don’t stray too far outside the Cynefn clear domain.

The less any of those applies, the more costly it is to figure it out as you go along, because accounting for design changes can become something of a game of crack the whip. Iterative design is still important under such circumstances, but it may need to be a more thoughtful form of iteration that’s actively mindful about which kinds of design decisions should be front-loaded and which ones can be delayed.

Re: When AI writes the software, who verifies it?

#95

Post by charlieflowers »

esafak wrote: post #60
charlieflowers wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "any sufficiently advanced agent is indistinguishable from a DSL." I don't quite follow but I'd love to hear more about that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws

No i get the clarke reference. But how is an agent a dsl?

Re: When AI writes the software, who verifies it?

#97

Post by sjajzh »

yoaviram wrote: post #32
MattDaEskimo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accountability then

Anticipating modes of failure, creating tooling to identify and hedge against risks.

If we could do this it would have been done already. Outsourced devs would be ubiquitous.

Re: When AI writes the software, who verifies it?

#98

Post by sjajzh »

holtkam2 wrote: post #14

At the end of the day you need humans who understand the business critical (or safety critical) systems that underpin the enterprise. Someone needs to be held accountable when things go wrong. Someone needs to be able to explain to the CEO why this or that is impossible. If you want to have AI generate all the code for your business critical software, fine, but you better make sure you understand it well. Sometimes t…

I think this gets to the heart of it. We’re gonna see a new class of devs & software emerge that only use AI and don’t read the code. The devs that understand code will still exist too, but there is certainly an appetite for going faster at the cost of quality.

I personally find the “move fast and break thing” ethos morally abhorrent, but that doesn’t make it go away.

Re: When AI writes the software, who verifies it?

#99

Post by throwaw12 »

sjajzh wrote: post #88
throwaw12 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You do I really want to say: "You are absolutely right" But here is a problem I am facing personally (numbers are hypothetical). I get a review request 10-15/day by 4 teammates, who are generating code by prompting, and I am doing same, so you can guess we might have ~20 PRs/day to review. now each PR is roughly updating 5-6 files and 10-15 lines in each. So you can estimate that, I am looking at around 50-60 files…

Ideally, you’re working with teammates you trust. The best teams I’ve worked on reviews were a formality. Most of the time a quick scan and a LGTM. We worked together prior to the review as needed on areas we knew would need input from others. AI changes none of this. If you’re putting up PRs and getting comments, you need to slow down. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. I’ll caveat this with that’s only if your emp…

> Ideally, you’re working with teammates you trust.

I do trust them, but code is not theirs, prompt is. What if I trust them, but because how much they use LLMs their brain started becoming lazy and they started missing edge cases, who should review the code? me or them?

At the beginning, I relied on my trust and did quick scans, but eventually noticed they became un-interested in the craft and started submitting LLM output as it is, I still trust them as good faith actors, but not their brain anymore (and my own as well).

Also, assumption is based on ideal team: where everyone behaves in good faith. But this is not the case in corporations and big tech, especially when incentives are aligned with the "output/impact" you are making. A lot of times, promoted people won't see the impact of their past bad judgements, so why craft perfect code

Re: When AI writes the software, who verifies it?

#100

Post by bonoboTP »

fmbb wrote: post #78
madrox wrote: post #42

I encourage everyone to RTFA and not just respond to the headline. This really is a glimpse into where the future is going. I've been saying "the last job to be automated will be QA" and it feels more true every day. It's one thing to be a product engineer in this era. It's another to be working at the level the author is, where code needs to be verifiable. However, once people stop vibing apps and start vibing kerne…

There are still no successful useful vibe codes apps. Kernels are pretty far away I think.

This is a very strange statement. People don't always announce when they use AI for writing their software since it's a controversial topic. And it's a sliding scale. I'm pretty sure a large fraction of new software has some AI involved in its development.
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