Comment by khasan222
10 hours ago
For sure every time you use ai you’re sacrificing understanding if you don’t plan out and understand how exactly the ai is going to do the work you asked it to do.
The same output that is such a bad thing in this article can also be used to gain context, by making a thorough plan with your ai first, reading through the plan and proposing changes just like you would with a real developer.
You can also use this output to have the ai write a journal as well. The journal can be as detailed as possible and essentially a ledger of all of the changes your ai has made to the code. This allows not only for your teammates reviewing your pr to gain greater context, but also can be used by yourself, or even the ai itself to figure the why behind a particular implementation was done the way it was, far into the future even.
Lastly how many of us ever deploy code without actually checking the feature works e2e? I would gather not many of us do, I don’t, because even though we may have a greater understanding of the code, we can make mistakes in the code or in our logic. And I keep coming back to why would we treat llms any differently? I believe we should be spending our energy thoroughly manually testing a feature to make sure when we brainstormed we actually did get every edge case, and it works well.
I think most people test at least a happy path of their code end to end. I think we can all agree that your last sentence is far more aspirational than bare minimum standard practice. (“I believe we should be spending our energy thoroughly manually testing a feature to make sure when we brainstormed we actually did get every edge case, and it works well.”)
I did one small side web project by only writing spec tests and prompts and testing the results in a browser, never reading nor editing a single line of generated code. It was something for home and so low stakes, but it worked remarkably well and was much better tested than the typical 2022-era home project of mine.
What does “much better tested” mean to you?
If you don’t read the tests to check they confer your intent or specifications, they’re more like tautologies than tests, you know?
I don't understand the comment.
I wrote the tests. That was how I expressed the spec and my intentions.