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Comment by eddythompson80 | Hacker News Reader

I don't really know what to say tbh. I feel insane at times too but I'm being a realist and a pragmatist. I think I'm in the "changed their mind" camp because I got tired of fighting and can't deny reality. It is a losing battle. All approaches to manage changes in a traditional way also don't work. I have seen people who left because they can and I might follow suit too.

Like I think (or know) code reviews are also over. Someone asks me for a 10-11am brainstorming meeting regarding a concept they are working on, at 11:15 they have a "design doc" ready, at 1pm they ping me if I had a chance to review it yet, at 3pm I approve it, at 3:30pm they send a 7k line PR... "dude, that's not ok. I'm not reviewing 7k line change" so they say "oh yes absolutely sorry about that. that makes a lot of sense. Do you want 7 1k-line PRs? or 14 500-line PRs?" "hey Claude, split this into 10 commits and open 10 stacked PRs" :|

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> Like I think (or know) code reviews are also over.

Whatever the size of code review chosen, merging totally unreviewed code to prod is still totally insane. There are a few AI code review products out there. The one I've used is fairly decent at picking out issues, though there's definitely some shortcomings vs a human reviewer with additional context (especially since not everything is written down for the bot to access). So I wouldn't say they are over. Even though the AI review isn't perfect, we all know human reviews aren't either.

As AI improves it'll be able to hold more of the codebase as context, enabling better, quicker reviews.

Yeah but who writes totally unreviewed code nowadays? Everyone I know doesn't commit until a model has reviewed the code that another model wrote.

Whether code review is inportant or not probably depends on whether the problem someone is solving is important or not. But when it is important, I think we should be putting the onus on the person who filed the PR instead of burning our own neurons trying to understand volumes of stuff. Tell me what you asked the AI to do. Why is that a good idea? Once I hear that answer (because many junior programmer ideas don’t even get past that point), let’s look at the code together. Tell me why you think the code you submitted does what you say. Did you look at the code? Did you write tests? Did you check for test coverage? Maybe you’re a little smarter than that. Did you think through pre- and post-conditions? Corner cases? Are certain undesirable behaviors impossible? How do you enforce that? Types? State machines?

Even before slop coding good code review was hard, because verification is a hard problem. But we have many tools at our disposal to increase confidence without having to go full-on mathematical proof. Human understanding has always been the bottleneck, and as long as the thing you are doing is for humans, humans will have good reasons to want to understand it, so they will remain the bottleneck. This is ok. It’s ok for humans to be the rate-limiter. But don’t go it alone and fry your own brain.

> Even before slop coding good code review was hard, because verification is a hard problem. But we have many tools at our disposal to increase confidence without having to go full-on mathematical proof. Human understanding has always been the bottleneck, and as long as the thing you are doing is for humans, humans will have good reasons to want to understand it, so they will remain the bottleneck.

When people rally agains AI, that is why. AI hypers think it’s about the actual coding. It is not. It’s about the understanding and what you built is logically sound, conceptually and concretely. The code aspect matters only for maintenance sake and verifying the logical structure.

Which is why good devs are burning out on this. The PR authors don’t care, management don’t care, so to not be between a rock and an hard place, you just LGTM the review. And then users are suffering with insane bugs.

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