Hacker News Reader

Comment by latortuga | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that your tagline is "spend less time writing, more time reviewing code" in the video. Developers already don't like reading the code, we even have a ubiquitous acronym for it. Writing is the fun part.

In my experience, junior developers become mid level developers by writing code, by practicing, by building small features, by doing grunt work. If they wanted to use an AI to do those tasks for them, I would tell them no - the whole point of having junior devs do simpler tasks is that's what level they're at. They don't get to the next level magically, it's by doing the work. If a high school football quarterback asked if he could skip practice and let his AI go to practice for him, I would wonder how he plans to get good at football.

I apologize that I don't have anything constructive to say here but you did ask for any of my thoughts.

View on HN

For sure, I completely agree. Reviewing code can be really annoying, especially if it's not well written/broken. We realized this last month, so we've moved closer to providing tested pull requests.

Also as a dev, writing code is energizing and I love spending my day building a new feature. But when you get into maintenance mode, it's not that fun anymore. There's a good amount of code in the intersection of "easy to review" + "annoying to write", so Sweep is aiming to address that first.

Overall, it's not so much about not writing any more code and more about writing more interesting code. Similarly for junior devs, even in the space of "grunt work", there's more and less interesting options.

The value prop is to hire fewer junior devs or even replace them. They don't mean to help junior devs.

Also, I'm not sure if you'd enjoy writing code for those "grunt work". I'd love PRs that I can easily check correctness for and would get some small job done.

Sweep is targeted towards senior devs that can do two things. 1. review code quickly 2. articulate requirements well

Also, here's another example of "grunt work". Sweep added a banner to our landing page, and I didn't touch my IDE at all. https://github.com/sweepai/landing-page/pull/226

I would honestly just ignore that feedback. It's needlessly reductive and oxymoronic (coding is fun! But give juniors boring grunt work)

His point wasn’t about whether the “grunt work” is enjoyable or not, but that it is necessary work for juniors to do in order to gain experience.

I’m not sure. If these AI tools become sophisticated enough it might be better experience to learn how to use them instead of doing the underlying work. Career-wise anyway.

It's necessary for sure, but we want to let junior devs choose to do the more interesting work.

We're also trying to make it easy to use Sweep. One outcome is an entirely simulated teammate, which is part of what we're doing with allowing you to review Sweep's PR

You're assuming that there is a large number of junior devs waiting for the opportunity to learn.

What if you have the opposite - a large number of relatively simple bugs waiting to get fixed and not enough junior devs do the work?

I think Sweep is a great idea and all of the additional developer capacity will be greedily soaked up by understaffed organisations.

How well it works will depend on how good those pull requests are. If it takes too much time of senior developers to review the pull requests then that is a problem.

I really agree with the second point. Even if there are enough junior devs, there's small issues where you're on the go and delegating is relatively expensive as the expected turn-around time is generally in the hours. Often times I would just do it myself, but then it burns part of the stamina. Also we're trying to make reviewing easier with webpage previews and automated testing through Github actions.

Tools like this will be useful for small shops that don’t have a genuine need for a junior-to-senior pipeline. It’s going to create a (an even more?) two-tiered community of developers: one tier that knows the AI tools/tricks to produce stuff, and one that knows how to do it themselves. I don’t know which tier should be considered superior yet: time will tell.

Yep, small shops definitely benefit. Fewer people means each person already knows more of the codebase. For a 3 person team they might know >50% each, while for a 10 person team they might only know 10%.

The previous belief here would be the 10 person gets more work done, but that will change as AI developers like Sweep become more popular. There are a lot of additional benefits for small teams, like fewer meetings + faster decisions.

It remains to be seen whether that’s a benefit. This tool replaces experience junior engineers have needed to become better developers. Its future value is dependent strongly on the assumption that AI tools like this will evolve quickly enough to make using them more valuable than other experience.

After all, if it doesn’t keep pace, the two-tier system I mentioned in my other comment will definitively be such that shops using these tools will not be as good as shops with a more traditional engineer skill development path.

Interesting, that change would take some time to materialize. In the meantime it might be best to adopt both? I don't see it as a complete substitute.

Right now you could have some junior devs picking up work that Sweep can't handle in order to grow and learn, and eventually still become senior devs. Having a small team also helps with mentorship (more focused attention).

From what I've seen in this thread, that basically means junior devs still need to learn about the entire codebase before working on anything meaningful. I have to say I'm very skeptical of AI tools actually replacing developers because AI tools depend so critically on data to function.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com