| I find people over-rotate on whether we should be reviewing AI-produced code. "What if bad code gets into production!" some programmers gasp, as if they themselves have never pushed bad code, or had coworkers do the same. I've worked at places where I've trusted everyone on my team to the extent that most PRs got only a quick glance before getting a "LGTM". On the flipside, I've also worked on teams where every person was a different kind of liability with the code that they pushed, and for those teams I implemented every linting / pre-commit / testing tool possible that all needed to pass inspection (including human review) before any code arrived on production. A year ago, AI was like that latter team I mentioned -- something I had to check, double check, and correct until I was happy with what it produced. Over the past 6 months, it's gotten closer (but still fairly far away) from the former team I mentioned -- I have to correct it about 10% of the time, whereas for most things it gets it right. The fact that AI produces a much _larger_ volume of code than the average engineer is perhaps slightly concerning, but I don't see it much differently than code at large companies. Does every Facebook engineer review every junior engineer's pull request to make sure bad code doesn't slip in? That isn't to say I'm for letting AI go wild with code -- but I think if at worse we consider AI to be a junior engineer we need to reign in with static analysis tools / linters / testers etc, we will probably be able to mitigate a lot of the downside. |
