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t43562today at 9:14 AM2 repliesview on HN

Who really truly enjoys that and doesn't see it as a chore?

I find the real way to review other people's code is to program with it and then I start seeing where the problems are much more clearly. I would do a review and spot nothing important then start working on my own follow-on change and immediately run into issues.


Replies

sampullmantoday at 9:46 AM

I usually don't mind, but tend to split reviews into two types. Either I understand the context and can quickly do an in depth review, or I have to take some time to actually learn about the code by reviewing the surrounding systems, experimenting with it, etc. But in both cases I would at least run the code and verify correctness.

I think it becomes a chore when there are too many trivial mistakes, and you feel like your time would have been better spent writing it yourself. As models and agent frameworks improve I see this happening less and less.

cbg0today at 9:56 AM

> Who really truly enjoys that and doesn't see it as a chore?

This is a whole different discussion, but I just see it as part of the job that I'm getting paid for, I don't need to enjoy it to do it.

Functional testing is a must now that writing tests is also automated away by LLMs as you can get a better understanding if it does what it says on the box, but there will still be a lot of hidden gotchas if you're not even looking at the code.

Plenty of LLM-written code runs excellent until it doesn't, though we see this with human written code too, so it's more about investing more time in the hopes of spotting problems before they become problems.

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