Thread

1. metalspot · 1790563007 · focus · HN ↗

   The true reason why code review is universal is that it provides a liability shield for negligence. Negligence is interesting. It has nothing to do with whether or not you ship something broken. As long as you follow a process that attempts to not ship something broken, then you are not negligent.

   Engineers played along with this farce because code review served valuable team collaboration, coordination and management functions, about which the author of the article is correct.

   Understanding a system by reading code is harder than understanding a system by writing code.

   If AI can generate code at 100X, 1000X, or 10000X human capacity (no ceiling here), and you are gated on code review as your mechanism for system understanding, then a team's productive output will barely increase.

   If companies want to compete in the world of AI generated code, human code review has to go. The only question is, what replaces it?

   Continuing to apply human code review to AI generated code is negligent, if you are shipping at AI generation speed, with that as your only gate, and no other systems and processes to validate correctness and limit risk.

   On the engineering side we can adapt easily.

   Code review was never about finding bugs. When we do code review the first thing we check is: "do the tests pass?" Then we look at the change and the test coverage added for it and ask: "does the test coverage adequately demonstrate the functionality of the code?" The we ask: "What is the scope and potential impact of this change?" "What is the deployment and rollback plan and how will we monitor and detect defects after deployment?"

   Code review was never about the code. It made the lawyers happy and provided a vehicle for doing the things that actually make systems work.

   1. cyh555 · 1790568724 · focus · HN ↗

      "does the test coverage adequately demonstrate the functionality of the code?"

      and is this a solved problem? If not, then the bottleneck is right here, if it is solved, then yeah we shouldn't need anymore software engineers other than the elites

      1. ares623 · 1790571757 · focus · HN ↗

         It's "largely solved". I'm not clarifying, thank you.

         1. Jweb_Guru · 1790573838 · focus · HN ↗

            Unless you are using Anthropic's super secret model that won't be released until 2028 this is a pretty laughable assertion.
      2. metalspot · 1790603476 · focus · HN ↗

         > and is this a solved problem?

         yes. it was solved before but when writing code by hand the cost of building exhaustive test suites was far to high to do it in practice, except in very narrow cases where high assurance was required. now that AI can implement all of the testing frameworks for you it can be done for everything.

         > we shouldn't need anymore software engineers

         no. the job changes, but the skills that software engineers have are more valuable than ever because they now gate a much higher level of productive output.

         corporations aren't really ruthless profit optimizers. micro incentives don't actually favor efficiency. hiring decisions don't actually have much to do with output and productivity. for example: it has been known forever that adding more people to a project usually decreases velocity, but that has never stopped anyone.

         technology changes but people don't. AI makes higher quality software faster and at greater scale, and velocity is what is really valuable, so companies that master AI development will be making more money, and they will hire more people, because that is what they do.

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