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0c3ca83 • today at 5:11 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

If you've given up on understanding your code base, AI will give you a better solution than you could come up with. Not because AI is better, but because you've become a low performer.

AI is reasonable at reviewing code, with only a 50-60% false-positive rate, and its persistence at broadening scope often finds things human reviewers would miss. It's still actually still pretty shitty at writing code, though, again, with enough ground truth and persistence, it'll often generate something that's a functional turd. It will sometimes come up with better suggestions if you prompt for it, but it needs a ton of hand-holding at the moment. And usually the suggestions are still overly complicated messes that you can trim down to 1/10th the size, while keeping the core idea.


Replies

StilesCrisis • today at 5:37 PM

Congrats to you if you're working in a codebase small enough to know it all. Do you know every knob in your database? Every tuning option on your webserver? Every warning and lint setting on your compiler? Wish I did! Do you read every PR that comes through the system, every day? You must keep busy.

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