Comment by theshrike79
2 months ago
Also 5: "But LLMs produce a bunch of code I need to read and review".
Yes, but so do your coworkers? Do you complain about every PR you need to read? Are they all compressed diamonds of pure genious, not a single missed character or unoptimised function? Not a bad or suboptimal decision in sight?
If so, shoot me a mail, I want to work where you're working =)
My coworkers learn, and an important part of my job is teaching them. LLM-based tools don't.
A circular saw doesn't learn either. It's a tool, just like an LLM.
The LLM isn't replacing your coworkers, it's a tool they can (and IMO should) learn to use, just like an IDE or a debugger.
My coworkers do sure. But I don’t have to completely reread what I wrote to grok it. That’s the issue.
You either prompt and read the code it wrote to understand it before making a PR, or you prompt and drop the PR for your team. The latter is disrespectful.
This has been my biggest hurdle so far. Sure the models do great at writing code, find things faster than I would. But time wise I still have to read what it wrote, in depth.
ETA: I also implicitly trust my coworkers. This trust has been built over years. I don’t trust LLM generated code the same way.
Prompt & Drop is just plain stupid and warrants me walking over to said coworker's desk to smack them on the back of the head. =)
As for "reading in depth", it all depends on what you're doing, for most stuff I can just see if it looks good or not, I don't need to check out the PR and run it on my machine with a step-debugger to see what's going on.
And stuff should have unit tests anyway, if the tests pass and test coverage is sufficient - do you really need to go through the code with a fine toothed comb? If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck and looks like a duck, isn't it duck enough. Do you need to dissect it and see if it's Duck all the way through?
At some point you just need to trust the tools you're using.