This the core unspoken bone of contention in most AI arguments I think: most people either arent writing code with strict quality requirements or dont realize where their use of AI is violating them.
That said most of the world's most useful code has strict quality requirements. Even before AI 90% of SLOC would be tossed away without much if any use, 9% was used infrequently while 1% runs half the world's software.
I think this misses the scale of the problem. Review never fixed tech debt, nor did it fix relevant/bloated test suites. It didn't solve complexity, or eliminate footguns. Very few people (I would argue almost noone) had developed theories for what all of these even were, or how to spot them in code.
Reviewers aren't perfect, far from it. And we just gave them ~20x more code to review. Incentives mean that taking 20x longer to review is unacceptable. So where do we go from here?
I'm really amused at how quickly things changed from "yes, the AI is writing it all, but I'm carefully reviewing every line" to "it would take too long and be too confusing to review any of it"
Agreed. Reviewing code takes so much longer and is far more exhausting than writing it, and you still don’t understand the logic as well or intuitively as you would if you write it.
Code reviews should be done by someone other than the author though, so the only thing that changes with ai generated code in that respect is the amount of it
Before: One person writes the code (and likely understands it thoroughly), another person reviews the code to spot obvious mistakes or shortcomings. Now: AI writes the code, a person reviews it to spot obvious mistakes or shortcomings.
In the before case, you have a person who has a deeper understanding of the code and in the AI case, you don’t, instead you have even more code to review.
When a competent programmer is writing the code, the human written code tends to be higher quality too. So it’s not just about review quantity but the quality of code being reviewed. Some people claim the AI writes great code, but that just hasn’t been my experience yet (at least with the models I’ve tried, including Opus). They still make ridiculously bad decisions regularly.
>When a competent programmer is writing the code, the human written code tends to be higher quality too
This is a great idea, but on average is deeply untrue. Far and away most programmers today write significantly worse code than LLMs. Also LLMs are fantastic at generating high level summaries and comments in code
That said most of the world's most useful code has strict quality requirements. Even before AI 90% of SLOC would be tossed away without much if any use, 9% was used infrequently while 1% runs half the world's software.