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by champagnepapi 15 days ago
How are you verifying all the code that's generated? Do you think that verifying properly would take you as much effort as the original implementation would've?
4 comments

I think this is the real problem. I am sympathetic towards automated code synthesis.

But without formal verification and a human reviewing specifications to ensure alignment, I think code will end up being broken in unexpected ways or drift away from the original intent.

I guess I'm of two minds on it.

Sometimes, I will review every line, test the front-end in a staging environment, verify the backend contract, et cetera. Over time, though, I realized that many of these reviews just didn't result in any necessary changes. The current model (with guidance/claude.md/etc) was able to one-shot the task.

Not to overly personify, but imagine how you might treat a junior colleague. You start by reviewing everything they do with a microscope, later you review the broad-strokes, and eventually, for low-stakes or well-scoped tasks, you just play with the demo and the ticket and approve it.

Otherwise it's not materially different than a pre-AI world - you've got sample I/O, test cases, hand-review, look at the application on different screen sizes, contrive some edge cases, test against a spec if there is one - et cetera.

Have you ever worked in a company? Have you ever worked in a F100?

Companies are paying for software, not for owning the code.

The same way that I verified all of the code that was written before AI. Just because you hand type the code doesn't mean that you don't have to test and verify. I can test much more thoroughly with AI that without.