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by Sophira 73 days ago
> I get the desire not to do that because you want to verify everything they do, but you can still do that by reviewing the code later on without the pain of step-by-step approvals.

It's a well-known truth in software development that programmers hate having to maintain code written by someone else. We see all the ways in which they wrote terrible code, that we obviously would never write. (In turn, the programmers after us will do the same thing to our code.)

Having to get into the mindset of the person writing the code is difficult and tiring, but it's necessary in order to realise why they wrote things the way they did - which in turn helps you understand the problems they were solving, and why the code they wrote actually isn't as terrible in context as it looked at first glance.

I think it makes sense that this would also apply to the use of generative AI when programming - reviewing the entire codebase after it's already been written is probably more error-prone and difficult than following along with each individual step that went into it, especially when you consider that there's no singular "mindset" you can really identify from AI-generated output. That code could have come from anywhere...