alt Hacker NewsI think this is a bit of a simplistic mental approach. I've certainly seen a lot of "The engineer owns the outcome, AI is just a tool, don't release anything you don't vouch for."
However, I just don't think that's realistic. It's asking an author to suddenly become an editor. It's asking somebody who writes code to now read and debug others code.
It can actually be harder to find the the bug in a tricky piece of code than it can be to write your own correct code from scratch. I see AI introduce all sorts of bugs all the time in my personal projects that I would never introduce, and would never think to test for, especially around anything graphical.
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> It's asking somebody who writes code to now read and debug others code.
This has been a big part of the job for anyone on a team for at least 20 years. I do agree that it’s the hardest and worst part of the job, and has now become the majority of the job for anyone who isn’t vibe coding. So, that sucks.
> It's asking somebody who writes code to now read and debug others code.
That's exactly right. Open source projects are currently drowning under LLM generated PRs, where those who used to write code are simply punting that work to AI, but still expecting others to review it. It's not okay to expect such a free lunch. If you moved the labour of writing code one step away, then you are yourself the first line of defence now, so you better start reviewing code that you claim to be yours.
> It's asking an author to suddenly become an editor.
I think that’s right, and what is needed. It still gives a significant speed up for coding, while still keeping the output human maintainable.
There is the idea that the agent will just produce binary code directly at some point. I don’t know if it ever comes to that but for now I’m in the ‘I’ve become an editor’ camp.
I think the answer is not to debug the code, but, when possible, to debug the outputs. The code may be considered to be a black box much of the time. (This is much more true for my hobby projects than my work projects.)
If you can explain how to reproduce a bug, you can ask the AI to debug the code and it usually works, in my experience. If not, you can ask it to add logging or other tools for better observability.