Comment by Philpax
6 days ago
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.
6 days ago
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.
"regular" code review is indeed a total theater, a travesty, a farce.
Real, meticulous code review takes absolutely forever.
1 reply →
Interesting point! I'd like to explore this a bit more.
Would you mind going into a bit more specifics/details on why regular code review practice would become unworkable, like which specific part(s) of it?
Huh? Why? How? Say the code takes one day to write, and two days to review. What about that is unworkable?
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