[dkersten]

That doesn’t conflict with my statement.

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.

[mountainriver]

>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

[dkersten]

> Far and away most programmers today write significantly worse code than LLMs

Your experience with LLMs do not match my own. Not to say that I haven’t experienced terrible human written code where I’ve wondered what the author could possibly have been thinking, but overall, I still find LLM written code to be on the poor side.

Like, the code itself is ok, but the wider picture reasoning and abstractions are bad. It also makes really dumb decisions far too often. Or doggedly shoehorns its first idea in no matter how badly it fits.