this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Arguably this is comparing apples and oranges here. I agree with you that code reviews aren't going to be useful for evaluating a big code dump with no context. But I'd also say that a significant amount of software in the world is either written with no code review process or a process that just has a human spitting out the big code dump with no context.
The AI hype is definitely hype, but there's enough truth there to justify some of the hand-wringing. The guy who told you he only has to throw away the 20% of the code that's useless is still getting 100% of his work done with maybe 40% of the effort (i.e., very little effort to generate the first AI cut, 20% to figure out the stupid stuff, 20% to fix it). That's a big enough impact to have significant ripples.
Might not matter. It seems like the way it's going to go in the short term is that paranoia and economic populism are going to kill the whole thing anyway. We're just going to effectively make it illegal to train on data. I think that's both a mistake and a gross misrepresentation of things like copyright, but it seems like the way we're headed.
That's not totally true. Even if a developer throws a massive pull request dump at you, there is a high chance the dev at least ran the program locally and tried it out (at least the happy path).
With AI the code might not even compile. Or it looks good at first glance, but has a disastrous bug in the logic (that is extremely easy to overlook).
As with most code: Writing it takes me maybe 10% of the time, if even that. The main problem is finding the right solution, covering edge cases and so on. And then you spend 190% of the time trying to fix a sneaky bug that got into the code, just because someone didn't think of a certain case or didn't pay attention. If AI throws 99% correct code at me it would probably take me longer to properly fix it than to just write it myself from scratch.