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champagnepapiyesterday at 8:49 PM4 repliesview on HN

How are you verifying all the code that's generated? Do you think that verifying properly would take you as much effort as the original implementation would've?


Replies

m_w_yesterday at 9:04 PM

I guess I'm of two minds on it.

Sometimes, I will review every line, test the front-end in a staging environment, verify the backend contract, et cetera. Over time, though, I realized that many of these reviews just didn't result in any necessary changes. The current model (with guidance/claude.md/etc) was able to one-shot the task.

Not to overly personify, but imagine how you might treat a junior colleague. You start by reviewing everything they do with a microscope, later you review the broad-strokes, and eventually, for low-stakes or well-scoped tasks, you just play with the demo and the ticket and approve it.

Otherwise it's not materially different than a pre-AI world - you've got sample I/O, test cases, hand-review, look at the application on different screen sizes, contrive some edge cases, test against a spec if there is one - et cetera.

nextosyesterday at 8:56 PM

I think this is the real problem. I am sympathetic towards automated code synthesis.

But without formal verification and a human reviewing specifications to ensure alignment, I think code will end up being broken in unexpected ways or drift away from the original intent.

Foobar8568yesterday at 8:58 PM

Have you ever worked in a company? Have you ever worked in a F100?

Companies are paying for software, not for owning the code.

doug_durhamyesterday at 9:35 PM

The same way that I verified all of the code that was written before AI. Just because you hand type the code doesn't mean that you don't have to test and verify. I can test much more thoroughly with AI that without.