alt Hacker NewsThe problem is: how can you scale human code review? Because LLMs continue to be better at coding, and continue to write a lot of code, and will always code at a lower level with the time passes. So the difficulty of human review will become higher and higher. It's clear that human review it's the very bottleneck in this workflow.
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> Because LLMs continue to be better at coding
A major reason slop exists is because they are not "better" at coding, given some subjective criteria. They are notably worse at documentation and somewhat poor at choosing abstractions in my experience. For the most part, I witness the tools copying other examples out of the working repository, which makes them exactly as bad as the humans who originally wrote the code.
> will always code at a lower level with the time passes
For humans, this is traditionally an anti-pattern. We are good at intuiting abstractions and knowing when to use them or climb up and down the abstraction hierarchy. For LLMs, this is also an anti-pattern, because going lower-level is an exponential waste of tokens; both for writing and reading the resulting code, which they do constantly in order to understand the project again and again in order to fulfill your prompts.
Thinking of human review as a "bottleneck" is incorrect framing. We are quality control. You can choose to cede quality control to LLMs and agent harnesses, that's up to you. In my experience this generally leads to a meteoric rise in slop, because the tools increasingly resort to writing more code to solve a problem instead of updating existing code or writing the correct code. When I shake my head at some slop code, then read the slop comment that uses some slop justification that isn't real and only existed in the prompt context, I am happy that I took the time to review it. Maybe that makes me a bottleneck, oh well.
But do we really need to generate orders of magnitude more code per day than what people were writing a few years ago?
The AI slop code is so good that I’m kicking back more Jira tickets than ever for failing my tests.
> LLMs continue to be better at coding
Faster definitely, but even with the latest Fable model "better" is often debatable and varies a lot based on what you care about. I can often rewrite what Claude did in 1/2 the lines or less to do the same thing while making it easier for humans to understand and maintain. Claude gives me a sculpture in a good rough starting shape, but it usually needs to be sculpted down at the end whether manually or by prompting Claude about the unnecessary bloat it generated.