alt Hacker NewsReviewing AI generated code at PR time is a bottleneck. It cancels most of the benefits senior leadership thinks AI offers (delivery speed).
There’s also this implicit imbalance engineers typically don’t like: it takes me 10 min to submit a complete feature thanks to Claude… but for the human reviewing my PR in a manual way it will take them 10-20 times that.
Edit: at the end real engineers know that what takes effort is a) to know what to build and why, b) to verify that what was built is correct. Currently AI doesn’t help much with any of these 2 points.
The inbetweens are needed but they are a byproduct. Senior leadership doesn’t know this, though.
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This is what I don't understand about this policy. There's no way a senior has enough spare capacity to be the gate keeper on every PR made by AI below them. So now we are just making it so the senior people use more AI to keep up but now they're to blame for letting it happen.
It sounds like a piss poor deal for seniors unless senior engineer now means professional code reviewer.
> Senior leadership doesn’t know this, though.
Well, you'd think senior leadership should know how their business and their people work.
Surely they know all this. They're worried about AI code degrading codebase quality, so they're putting on the brakes.
Indeed. My view as a CEO is, if you are still reviewing the code yourself then what use is it that you can produce a bunch of text at a faster rate?
I'd prefer people wrote good quality code and checked it as they went along... whilst allowing room for other stuff they didn't think of to come to the front. The production process of using LLMs is entirely different, in its current state I don't see the net benefit.
E.g. if you have a very crystalised vision of what you want, why would I want an engineer to use an LLM to write it, when the LLM can't do both raw production and review? Could this change? Sure. But there's no benefit for me personally to shift toward working that way now - I'd rather it came into existence first before I expose myself to incremental risk that affects business operations. I want a comprehensive solution.