alt Hacker NewsYeesh, is "never reading the code" really the modus operandi we want from AI?
Microsoft, for all their warts, at least had the compassion to call their AI product "Copilot", suggesting we have some residual agency in whatever it is that it produces.
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It's clearly not the MO that capable engineers want, but it's the MO that is getting funded right now.
Reading code carefully is harder than writing code unless the code is written consistently and clearly in a way that is idiomatic to the reader. And there's way more code to review now, but companies aren't scaling up the number of skilled engineers on staff. So in practice, never reading all of the diffs is the MO that will be built into code we depend on.
There are lots of good use cases for vibe coding (”never reading the code”), prototypes, various explorations and one-offs. I’ve done various kinds of migrations where I didn’t bother to review the code much, just the output.
Possibly also some user-facing tools with a limited task and runtime environment.
Incidentally, these are all use cases where performance isn’t critical, typically, so you might as well write them in Python or Typescript or whatever makes most sense for the task.
Real production code? Yeah, you still need to be able to read it and understand it.
Let's say you get access to a microservice from another team in the company. Do you read through and audit every line of code?
What if it's from an external vendor? A 3rd party SaaS?
At which point do you stop caring about reading every line of code you run?
Copilot is a legacy brand from 2021 (anyone remembers it's free beta? good times) when it was just a rudimentary autocomplete powered by GPT-3. I don't think it aligns with Microsoft's views and priorities now.