Comment by munksbeer
7 days ago
We still review everything. And we guide by planning, prompting, speccing.
So we're not actually much faster at the core code, because reviews still take time. Ultimately, we're on the finance markets and we have regulatory pressures and I, as the human, am responsible for putting the code out there.
But we're freeing up a lot of time to get other things correct. We have n x more metrics now because plumbing in basic stuff is now trivial. We now have dozens more tools and skills to help analyse issues (e.g. why this price and not x), answer questions, etc.
I now have skills to scrape logs, download unpack and scape our bus persistence, link to kdb, and so on, all in my claude prompt, joining it all together and the AI is figuring things out. I can diagnose things, I don't know, maybe 100 times faster?
It is revolutionary, and I am highly sceptical of the motivations of people who keep saying otherwise.
When you review everything, do you understand every line of code before approving? Do you make it rewrite code that is too abstract or unclear for future humans to understand? Does AI write the tests and do you review those with the same diligence?
I don't disagree that it's revolutionary in many ways, but I am seeing lots of companies make very costly mistakes by relying too heavily on AI without fully understanding the code it writes and without fact checking its outputs by a human.
Yes we understand all code merged. Yes, I have coding rules and standards that the agent follows to ensure it writes code in virtually the same style as the whole team does. Someone isn't going to let my change be merged if they don't understand it.
My hunch however is that in a few years we're not going to be reviewing as heavily as we improve guardrails and can trust the AI code and review cycle more. I'm not sure what to expect for my career at that point.