Comment by btown
6 hours ago
Taking a best-faith approach here, I think it's indicative of a broader issue, which is that code reviewers can easily get "tunnel vision" where the focus shifts to reviewing each line of code, rather than necessarily cross-referencing against both small details and highly-salient "gotchas" of the specification/story/RFC, and ensuring that those details are not missing from the code.
This applies whether the code is written is by a human or AI, and also whether the code is reviewed by a human or AI.
Is a Github Copilot auto-reviewer going to click two levels deep into the Slack links that are provided as a motivating reference in the user story that led to the PR that's being reviewed? Or read relevant RFCs? (And does it even have permission to do all this?)
And would you even do this, as the code reviewer? Or will you just make sure the code makes sense, is maintainable, and doesn't break the architecture?
This all leads to a conclusion that software engineering isn't getting replaced by AI any time soon. Someone needs to be there to figure out what context is relevant when things go wrong, because they inevitably will.
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