Comment by layla5alive
5 days ago
And (rigorously) reviewing code is easily 10x harder than writing it.
But this won't stop it from happening.
5 days ago
And (rigorously) reviewing code is easily 10x harder than writing it.
But this won't stop it from happening.
This is just obviously not true. I had a full-time job of reviewing code for roughly 15 years and it was never true, but it's also just intuitively not true that engineers spend 10 hours reviewing their peers code to every 1 they spend writing it.
What you mean to claim here is that verification is 10x harder than authorship. That's true, but unhelpful to skeptics, because LLMs are extremely useful for verification.
I once graded over 100 exams in an introductory programming course (Python). The main exercise was to implement a simple game (without using a runtime).
Some answers were trivial to grade—either obviously correct or clearly wrong. The rest were painful and exhausting to evaluate.
Checking whether the code was correct and tracing it step by step in my head was so draining that I swore never to grade programming again.
Right, sure. So: this doesn't generally happen with LLM outputs, but if it does, you simply kill the PR. A lot of people seem to be hung up on the idea that LLM agents don't have a 100% hit rate, let alone a 100% one-shot hit rate. A huge part of the idea is that it does not matter if an agents output is immediately workable. Just take the PRs where the code is straightforwardly reviewable.
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While I'm still a skeptic (despite my Cursor usage at work), I still absolutely agree. Careful review has never been 10x more difficult than writing the code, I'm not sure where this comes from. And I've had about the same experience as you.
Also, and know this doesn't matter, but it's so weird to see this downvoted. That's not an "I disagree" button...
Thanks! On HN, it actually is a "disagree" button though; totally cromulent to downvote disagreement here. One of the site's big idiosyncrasies!
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I really don't think that's true at all. Anyone here can read and sign off on 1000 lines of code faster than they can write the same 1000 lines of code, pretty much no matter what the code is.
It also depends heavily on the language.
I can review 100x more Go code in a set amount of time than I can, say React.
With Go there are repetitive structures (if err == nil) and not that many keywords, it's easy to sniff out the suspicious bits and focus on them.
With Javascript and all of the useWhatevers and cyclic dependencies and functions returning functions that call functions, it's a lot harder to figure out what the code does just by reading it.
I definitely get your point, but it's also pretty annoying to write weird indirect or meta-functional code, not just to read it. It's still almost always faster to read than to write.
I can think of edge cases where a certain section of code is easier and faster to write than to read, but in general - in our practical day-to-day experiences - reading a lot of code is faster than writing a lot of code. Not just faster but less mentally and physically taxing. Still mentally taxing, yes, but less.
You have misunderstood this "common wisdom".
The idea is that people will spend 10x more time reading your code in all future time stacked together. Not that reading and understanding your code once takes 10x the effort of writing it, which is obviously untrue.
Here is the quote from Clean Code, where this idea seems to originate from:
> Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing code is well over 10 to 1.