Thread

1. zug_zug · 1789908167 · focus · HN ↗

   I think this is a bit of a simplistic mental approach. I've certainly seen a lot of "The engineer owns the outcome, AI is just a tool, don't release anything you don't vouch for."

   However, I just don't think that's realistic. It's asking an author to suddenly become an editor. It's asking somebody who writes code to now read and debug others code.

   It can actually be harder to find the the bug in a tricky piece of code than it can be to write your own correct code from scratch. I see AI introduce all sorts of bugs all the time in my personal projects that I would never introduce, and would never think to test for, especially around anything graphical.

   1. geertj · 1789908802 · focus · HN ↗

      > It's asking an author to suddenly become an editor.

      I think that’s right, and what is needed. It still gives a significant speed up for coding, while still keeping the output human maintainable.

      There is the idea that the agent will just produce binary code directly at some point. I don’t know if it ever comes to that but for now I’m in the ‘I’ve become an editor’ camp.

      1. bigstrat2003 · 1789970988 · focus · HN ↗

         The time it takes you to review the code the LLM produces is the same amount of time it would take to just write the code yourself. There's no speedup to be had using these things, despite what many claim.

         1. sfn42 · 1789991587 · focus · HN ↗

            Strongly disagree. I know my codebase well, I know what I'm expecting before I ask Claude to do it, and I tell it what I'm expecting. I might tell it roughly what I want, have it make a plan, review the plan and ask for changes if necessary, then execute.

            This way I don't need to scrutinize every detail, I just look over the big picture. I also care a lot more about the big picture - architecture and data flow etc. Basically if you view your codebase as a tree I care much more about the trunk and the big branches than I do about the smaller branches and particularly the leaves. So the details of some little leaf function somewhere are fairly insignificant, it's trivial to change at any time. As long as it works and isn't unreasonably slow it's fine.

            Working this way I can get things done in minutes or hours that would previously take days or even weeks.

            1. abalashov · 1789996892 · focus · HN ↗

               > I know my codebase well

               I'll bet you know it because you wrote and/or worked on it manually, likely over a period of years. The odds of you knowing a slop codebase that well, or even particularly at all, are much lower.

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