Not enough attention is been given to this imbalance.
It is impressive having an AI that can write code for you, but an AI that helps me understand which code we (as a team) should write would be much more useful.
Maybe this is because I'm just not used to it, maybe the workflow isn't good enough, or maybe it's because I don't trust the model enough to summarize things correctly.
I do agree that this is an area that could use improvement and I see a lot of utility there.
The default workflow is to follow the commit history until I don't get to where and when the code in it's current shape was introduced. Then trying reading the commit message that generally link to a ticket and then acquire from tribal knowledge of the team why it was done like that. If it is still necessary, what can we do today instead, etc...
And similarly when designing new code that needs to integrate on existing piece of code... Why there are such constraints in place? Why was it done like that? Who in the team know best?
What I could have used the other day was "find the commit where this variable became unused". I wanted to know if the line that used it was intentionally deleted or if it got lost in a refactor. I eventually found it but I had to click through dozens of commits to find the right one.
Inevitably the issue tracker gets moved/replaced/deprecated, and so all of that context disappear into the void. The code however is eternal.
Even if I can reason about each line individually, sometimes code is just complicated and maintains invariants that are never specified anywhere. Some of that can come down to "what were the constraints at the time and what did we agree on", but sometimes it's just complicated even if it doesn't have to be. The latter is something I would love for a LLM to simplify, but I just don't trust it to do that consistently correct.
Sorry if it wasn't clear.
Not only the intention, but also the reason behind it.
Personally, I think the problem is that if the AI got it wrong, it would waste you a lot of time trying to figure out whether it's wrong or not. It's similar to outdated comments.
what? ok. Nice ideals.