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IMO the biggest issue with AI code is that writing code is the easiest part of software development. Reviewing code is so much more difficult than writing it, e

by Zanfa 11mo ago

IMO the biggest issue with AI code is that writing code is the easiest part of software development. Reviewing code is so much more difficult than writing it, even more so if you're not already intimately familiar with it in the first place. It's like with AI images, where they look plausible at first, but then you start noticing all the little things that are off in the sidelines.

Dilettante_ 11mo ago
writing code is the easiest part of software development. Reviewing code is so much more difficult than writing it A lot of people say this, and I do not doubt that it is fully true in their real experience. But it is not necessarily the only way for things to be. If more time and effort were put into writing code which is easier to review, the difficulty of writing it would increase and the difficulty of reading it would decrease, flipping that equation. The incentives just aren't like that. It doesn't pay to maximize readability against time spent writing: Not every line will have to be reviewed, and not every line that has to be reviewed will be so complex that readability needs to be perfect to be maintainable.
- oblio 11mo ago
  The problem with AI is that those incentives wrong incentives are taken to 10000x. And regarding "not every line will have to be reviewed, and not every line that has to be reviewed will be so complex that readability needs to be perfect to be maintainable.", the problem with AI is that code becomes basically unknowable. Which is fine if everything that is built is slop, but many things aren't slop. Stuff that touches money, healthcare, personal relationships, etc you know, the things that matter in life, risks all turning into slop, which <will> have real life consequences. We'll start seeing this in a few years.
- Zanfa 11mo ago
  It's not the code itself that makes review difficult. Even the best written code can be difficult to review. The complexity of effective code review arises from the fact that you need to understand the domain to evaluate correctness of both the code itself and the tests covering it.

by Zanfa 11mo ago

Dilettante_ 11mo ago

writing code is the easiest part of software development. Reviewing code is so much more difficult than writing it A lot of people say this, and I do not doubt that it is fully true in their real experience. But it is not necessarily the only way for things to be. If more time and effort were put into writing code which is easier to review, the difficulty of writing it would increase and the difficulty of reading it would decrease, flipping that equation. The incentives just aren't like that. It doesn't pay to maximize readability against time spent writing: Not every line will have to be reviewed, and not every line that has to be reviewed will be so complex that readability needs to be perfect to be maintainable.

oblio 11mo ago
The problem with AI is that those incentives wrong incentives are taken to 10000x. And regarding "not every line will have to be reviewed, and not every line that has to be reviewed will be so complex that readability needs to be perfect to be maintainable.", the problem with AI is that code becomes basically unknowable. Which is fine if everything that is built is slop, but many things aren't slop. Stuff that touches money, healthcare, personal relationships, etc you know, the things that matter in life, risks all turning into slop, which <will> have real life consequences. We'll start seeing this in a few years.
Zanfa 11mo ago
It's not the code itself that makes review difficult. Even the best written code can be difficult to review. The complexity of effective code review arises from the fact that you need to understand the domain to evaluate correctness of both the code itself and the tests covering it.