Comment by bloat
6 days ago
So we replace the task of writing tedious boilerplate with the task of reading the AI's tedious boilerplate. Which takes just as long. And leaves you with less understanding. And is more boring.
6 days ago
So we replace the task of writing tedious boilerplate with the task of reading the AI's tedious boilerplate. Which takes just as long. And leaves you with less understanding. And is more boring.
All of these people advocating for AI software dev are effectively saying they would prefer to review code instead of write it. To each their own I guess but that just sounds like torture to me.
It's because these people don't know how to write it, think they know how to review it. Ship a todo list app in a day, and then write blog posts about how they are changing the world.
I'm not familiar with the author's work. What % of their time is spent writing code?
The thought alone makes me want to hang up my (professional) keyboard and open a nursery/gardening center.
well said!
You are either a very fast producer or a very slow reader. Claude and Gemini are much faster at producing code than I am, and reviewing their code - twice over, even - still takes less time than writing it myself.
Reviewing code is often slower than writing it. You don't have to be an exceptionally fast coder or slow reviewer for that to be true.
The amount of time I spend going back and forth between the implementation and the test cases to verify that the tests actually fully cover the possible failure cases alone can easily exceed the time spent writing it, and that's assuming I don't pull the branch locally and start stepping through it in the debugger.
The idea that AI will make development faster because it eliminates the boring stuff seems quite bold because until we have AGI, someone still needs to verify the output, and code review tends to be even more tedious than writing boilerplate unless you're speed-reading through reviews.
If this was the case, regular code review as a practice would be entirely unworkable.
4 replies →
Are you, though? Reading code is harder, potentially much harder.[1]
And I suspect the act of writing it yourself imparts some lower level knowledge you don't get by skimming the output of an AI.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/26/reading-code-is-li...
I think he is specifically referring to boilerplate code. It is not hard to understand boilerplate code.
But you definitely don't understand it nearly as well as if you wrote it. And you're the one that needs to take responsibility for adding it to your codebase.
In this thread, we pretend that the difficult and time-consuming part of a code review is all the reading you have to do.
then you are a terribly sloppy reviewer
Indeed, instead of writing code to shave a Yak, we're now instead reviewing how the Yak was (most-shittily) shaved.
>So we replace the task of writing tedious boilerplate with the task of reading the AI's tedious boilerplate. Which takes just as long. And leaves you with less understanding. And is more boring.
These all sound like your projected assumptions. No, it generally does not take longer to review sizable code changes than it does to write it. This is further alleviated if the code passes tests, either existing or new ones created by the ai.
> Which takes just as long.
This has never once been my experience. Its definitely less fun but it takes way less time.
and probably results in a greater net energy consumption/carbon output