Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by brandall10 298 days ago
There's also a middle ground, where you have the AI generate PR reviews and then review them manually. So that 2 minutes of code you spat out (really more like 5-10 using CC) takes another hour or three to review, and maybe 5 to 10 more commits before it's merged in.

I've done this successfully on multiple projects in the 10-20k LOC, ~100 file area - fully LLM generated w/ tons of my personal feedback - and it works just fine. 4/5 features I implement it gets pretty close to nailing from the spec I provide and the work is largely refactoring. But the times it doesn't get it right, it is a slog that could eat the better part of a day. On the whole though it probably is a 3-5x speedup.

I'm a little less confident about doing this on projects that are much bigger... then breaking things up into modules begins to look more attractive.

1 comments

It's definitely a middle ground, but PR reviews, are not perfect. So it's easy to miss a lot of things and to have a lot of extra baggage. From reviewing code it's not always easy to tell exactly what's necessary or duplicate. So I agree, this is a middle ground of using LLMs to be more productive. Removing one bad line of code is worth adding a hundred good lines of code.