Why do so many people think that code reviews are primarily about mistrust or spotting mistakes?
IMO they’re primarily about ensuring shared understanding and agreement, not just about how things are changing now, but how they’ll change in the future..
Of all the many things I hate about this era of tech, the elevation of bad programmer culture to the stratosphere is definitely top 5.
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We don't need shared understanding and agreement in the AI era. The AI will do that for us.
I think both are real problems -
1. why should we trust the AI work? and
2. make me understand what the agent team did, while it spinned for hours
I think no 1 will be solved by N-version coding, keeping a population of replicas which provide differential testing on fuzzed inputs or prod data. This also helps no 2 - where execution diverges it can be a bug or a missing spec. Either fix code or fix spec. The reason I think N-version approach will win is that it is easier to code again the same app than to imagine code execution and its edge cases. Let real execution flesh out the divergences. It is easier than formal verification but still complex because it requires careful comparison where randomness, APIs, databases and other external state can be controlled for comparison.