Most of the narrative is about how AI is writing all/most code, but I’d wager that the fraction of human reviewed code is approaching zero far faster than anyone is realizing or willing to admit.
Case in point: I recently asked an LLM to write a pile of code to compile historical baseball stats to test betting success against the results of my hand-written code that evolves genetic algorithms. I marveled for a little while at the unbelievable improvement in EV/ROI that this script was showing could have been achieved from certain small tweaks. I only noticed after pushing a total bet that the push registered on the output as a win - and only because I was carefully staying on top of it. A single stupid recursively operating >= instead of > had caused completely nonsensical results that looked plausible.
Imagine, like, trusting a 10k loc script to give you data for something you were going to build in the physical world, and hoping an LLM hadn't made a mistake like that.
Personally it's probably the biggest struggle, trying to rein in the "spray and pray" approach LLMs typically like to take, and reducing the "patch on top of patch" syndrome too.
My team is using AI for most of the code, but the human review layer is crucial and unavoidable if you're interested in things like reliability, uptime, controlled feature rollouts, the integrity if your user's data, etc.
I’ve looked at the outputs here and there - and holy hell would it never pass review if I were trying to make something robust and anti-fragile. But since I can just have AI spit out a fix for the horrific “code” when it breaks in a totally predictable manner it’s just not worth my time to try to actually sit down and get it done right. Or even fight with AI by providing a good specification and design guidelines.
I imagine this is how things are going in the real world, given 30 years of working with various levels of humans. So long as the output is “good enough” it is the extreme minority of folks who care about much else. And that’s for mid-level to senior folks who have the experience to know better. Juniors wouldn’t even be able to pick out most of even the most obvious anti-patterns AI tends to spit out such as putting configuration within code, etc.
Refactoring is just in a new world too, that us olds probably have a hard time with. It’s no longer examine the code, identify design gaps, find high leverage places to start fixing, etc. It’s now “this is broken, rewrite from scratch” when it eventually turns into too much spaghetti.
In some ways being entirely focused on the outcomes is freeing in a way. But man under the hood is crazy and a whole new world.
I don't know many serious software engineers who'd take that approach, the convention was always to actually open up the code, evaluate the quality, see if they seem to know what they're doing, then chose the libraries you know works and could be adjusted to fit whatever you wanted it. At least for professional development inside companies, not a single library would be included unless you at least reviewed that the top-level dependency you pull in actually had code worth pulling in in the first place.
And this approach just as well today as it used to, you literally have to spend like 3-5 minutes browsing the code, evaluate the abstractions they've built and then say "Yes, looks good enough to try to use" or "Clearly these people just hacked this together as fast as they could".
Let us be honest, for your average dev, the assumption was that the number of github stars, npm/nuget downloads was a god proxy for quality.
I'd also wager that far more % of code gets more coverage of review, via prompting AI to do it, than it did before.
Most PR's pass as long as they A. pass checks, B. dont introduce regressions, C. fix a bug or implement a feature. People talk about this era of humans reviewing code with nostalgia... but that never existed at scale.
I'm sorry, but all you guys pretending like you don't have to review code now are going to get seriously burned by this. I also have to ask: do you think you provide any value to your company?