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sheepttoday at 4:12 PM1 replyview on HN

As a reviewer, I do care. Sure, people should be reviewing Claude-generated code, but they aren't scrutinizing it.

Claude-generated code is sufficient—it works, it's decent quality—but it still isn't the same as human written code. It's just minor things, like redundant comments that waste context down the road, tests that don't test what they claim to test, or React components that reimplement everything from scratch because Claude isn't aware of existing component libraries' documentation.

But more importantly, I expect humans to be able to stand by their code, and at times defend against my review. But today's agents continue to sycophantically treat review comments like prompts. I once jokingly commented on a line using a \u escape sequence to encode an em dash, how LLMs would do anything to sneak them in, and the LLM proceeded to replace all — with --. Plus, agents do not benefit from general coding advice in reviews.

Ultimately, at least with today's Claude, I would change my review style for a human vs an agent.


Replies

yarn_today at 4:19 PM

I agree with a lot of this, but thats kind of my point: if all these things (poor tests, non-DRY, redundant comments, etc) were true about a piece of purely human-written code then I would reject it just the same, so whats the difference? Likewise, if claude solely produced some really clean, concise and rigorously thought-through and testsed piece of code with a human backer then why wouldn't I take it?

As you allude to (and i agree), any non-trivial quantity of code, if SOLELY written by claude will probably be low-quality, but this is apparent whether I know its AI beforehand or not.

I am admittedly coming at this as much more of an AI-hater than many, but I still don't really get why I'd care about how-much or how-little you used AI as a standalone metric.

The people who are using AI "well" are the ones producing code where you'd never even guess it involved AI. I'm sure theres linux kernel maintainers using claude here and there, its not like they expect to have their patches merged because "oh well i just used claude here don't worry about that part".

(But also yes, of course I'm not going to talk to claude about your PR, I will only talk to you, the human contributor, and if you don't know whats up with the PR then into the trash it goes!)