Comment by danielvaughn
15 days ago
I've spent the last few months reading a lot of AI-generated code. It's extremely difficult.
It's like how psychopaths are eerie because there's nothing behind their eyes. AI-generated code is eerie because there's nothing between the lines. Code is in some sense theory building, and when you read a humans code you can (mostly) feel their theory working in the background. LLMs have no such theory, the code is just facts strewn about. Very weird experience to try and understand it.
My company is moving to a workflow where we only write Jira tickets, the LLM writes all the code and submits a PR. Then we are supposed to review the code the LLM wrote.
I'm looking for a new job.
that doesnt seem particularly horrible, as long as you as the engineer can still go change things in the code package and surrounding infrastructure to improve the output, and make sure that the agent is actually making the right stuff the first time you see the outputs
eg. setting up better feedback loops, improving CI/CD, breaking changes up at the right scale, etc.
you i assume also can then put in more work up front, doing simulations of solutions, lean proofs, and so on?
more engineering, less plumbing
The change is turning me from someone who writes pretty good reliable code, to someone who has to read and review pretty bad code. If you think this is an improvement, you're nuts.
It is inserting a pretty unreliable middle-man know for errors and hallucinations, that often just goes down and stops working for reasons we can't control into a workflow that has worked well for a decade, and we're paying extra to really break-even on the time spent creating new code.
Just because "everyone else is doing it". Not because it's proving to be a boon in productivity.
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my (gender neutral) dude.
WAKE UP.
Literally anyone can write a Jira ticket. US engineers are expensive. What do you think will happen when the powers that enacted this policy decide that the ticket to merged into prod rate is acceptable to them?
Thank you I've had trouble articulating this sense, but it's strong. An uncanny valley.