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Apparently it's not obvious to everyone, but if you can't write code, you can't review it. I do know people, and companies, that says: "So what, we ask Claude to write the code, Codex will then do the review". The thing that then strikes me as odd is that they still ask for the code in Python, Java, or some other high level language.... Why? Just ask Claude to dump out assembly, or a compiled binary, but no, they don't trust the LLM that much. They still want to be able to read the code. So they need developers that can read, debug and reason about the code, yet they don't want to give them the training that's required to do this?

I was thinking about an experience I had recently, and how it relates to my feelings about AI... And it bummed me out a lot.

So I took over an open source project called Omnivore. It's a reading app in the vein of Pocket. The hosted version used pdf-lib to inject some functionality into the pdf viewer. Namely, highlighting, note taking, and storing location. pdf-lib is a licensed application, so when taking it to fully self-hosted this needed to change.

I migrated it over to pdf.js. And I went through the entire process. I added all the functionality bit by bit. It didn't take exceptionally long, maybe 1-3 days. But that process was really satisfying. I found a bug, fixed it, and then found a stackoverflow issue where someone was also experiencing the same issue and suggested the fix. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59151218/pdfjs-error-on-...

I'm pretty sure an ai could have done all of this. And therein lies my fear and my upset with AI. Not only would it have robbed me of that experience, but it shows that I have in a way been devalued. Because I do think that took a level of skill. And now that's gone...

I write code all the time I can, outside the KPI metrics that everyone is being pushed to, I only care about AI for smarter code completion.

“Do you know what the industry term for a project specification that is comprehensive and precise enough to generate a program?

Code. It’s called code.”

- CommitStrip (https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1p70bk8/sp...)

I think if you’re doing it right, the core of your code should be the simplest expression of the underlying business logic. Of course there’s always going to be supporting layers, and maybe those don’t need to be reviewed. But if you haven’t read the code, there’s an extent to which you don’t know the business logic.

> For example, have you ever seen an agent follow the boy scout rule? Where they leave code better than they found it? And would you WANT them to try to do this?

Yes, it's in the rules; run profiles, check code coverage, do a critical review, post the report and follow up tasks. 90% of people I've worked with did not follow these boy scout rules nearly as well as today's frontier LLMs.

Is the author implying this is bad?

If you’re not writing code it won’t be long until you get to a point where your agent won’t be able to dig you out of whatever hole you’ve dug for yourself and then you are fubar because you’ve just completely forgotten how.

>It’s our job to build the software factory - not just the software. Software engineers maintain the assembly line allowing anyone to prompt for a change and ship immediately.

The job of the software engineer increasingly becomes to make himself unnecessary: to empower the nontechnical business users to do as much as reasonably possible, without his/her intervention.

This has, of course, been the dream of computing, since its inception! And the true aim of every "high level" or "beginner friendly" (looking at you javascript!) language.

But finally, now that the computer actually speaks English (and is beginning to stop making completely insane errors), it gradually becomes feasible.

Freeing the masses from the tyranny of the nerds!

i write code because i love it. it's something that makes me genuinely happy, so why would i give that up?

If we look at the progress made from ChatGPT 3.5 (Nov 2022) and up to today...shoot, I'm really starting to wonder if we'll even be reviewing code in 4 years.

And I'm not saying this as some sort of AI maximalist. If progress keeps up, I seriously doubt software engineering and development will, as we know it today, will be a thing in the next 5-10 years. Maybe humans will be left with designing the UI, but everything else will be abstracted away and AI will be doing all the actual work behind the scenes.

Note as some may be confused by the "1 hour ago" with comments older than that: this submission was rescued by dang when a previous discussion existed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883341

fwiw I think the rationale behind it is counterproductive because the only difference between a OP submitting their article link and someone else submitting their article link is internet points.

Why is this even a legit question? I need to keep writing code to stay relevant, not to forget my craft, be able to review code... So many reasons. AI doesn't change a thing.

I found myself working mostly at the requirements and architecture level, but do not give up proper code-review, creating skills along the way that maintain conventions.

All this debate around use LLM or not is tiring and just black and white thinking.

Can I use agents to code a SWE project? yes, with nuances.

Can I write code for a SWE project? yes, with nuances.

Its more options now, I'll write code about projects I deeply care and will use llm at work where its shared slop and forced usage.

exactly how many times do you plan on posting this here

Seems like there’s broadly two ways to use LLMs for coding - either as a way to generate the same code you would have written but faster, or as an opaque program-generator where you have no idea what the code is doing. One of these methods results in roughly the same amount of understanding and the other one radically less.