alt Hacker NewsI do not understand why people keep building these anti-human LLM systems.
It just needs ca 5 seconds to realize "oh damn, I would not want to be at the receiving end of this" and conclude that it's probably a bad idea.
Why does this keep happening?
Especially since the idea of having such automated reviews probably isn't bad. But why mess up the execution like this basically every single time?
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Because it is normal these days for people to be given work they have no clue about. Then I get PRs that want to make me cry from them.
So we setup llm based reviews that catch 99% of simple problems saving us 7 out of 8 rounds of PR reviews.
Seriously. Even as simple rules as: - if you submit a PR with new X, put a link to a successful run of said X to proove it's working. - if you choose not to reuse Y, but create a new one explain why.
Those are 100% ignored by people (or their crappy LLMs more likely - so I have to teach them how to prompt, or tell them which models to use for what).
Instead of loosing sanity responding for the 10th time to someone in time zone 12h away that he tries to merge reimplementation of what we already have with no description and no test run I have an automatic llm review that tells them that exact thing 2min after they create the PR.
Because people are dumb. It’s like when people complain about support bots. The reason they have support bots, is because boomers will pick up the phone to ask you how to plug their mouse in.
I used to think this way too, and I believe myself to have high standards about this kind of thing.
But with the very latest models (like, Opus 5.5 class and up), I am now of the opinion that the output, in non-creative situations like code review and most software development, is fine. Great, even. Better than the reviews a lot of humans generate.
Honestly, if you’re at all open minded about this, get a $20 Claude Pro subscription for a month (they are easy to cancel) and ask Claude Code with Opus 5.5 to review your codebase or a PR or two. I was very (pleasantly? unpleasantly?) surprised.
I have complex emotions about this (‘sad’ on balance I think - although it’s definitely not all simply in that direction), but I can’t deny it to myself.
I still bristle at reading articles and even documentation that’s not just ‘reference’ documentation written by it - and even that can get a bit weird and circuitous. But for review and coding? It’s great.
Because they are swamped and want to automate some of the process.
The way I see it the devs that put that in place are saying, listen before even reading your contribution I am going to feed it to a LLM with these instructions and see what it spits out. Now I will extricate my self from being the LLM proxy so you deal with this output and when it's okay I will look at it.
Same as "listen bud until it passes linting I won't even look at it." Just a much more flexible and fuzzy linter.