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Comment by Quothling | Hacker News Reader

> But do the humans need to actually understand the code? A "yes" means the bottleneck is understanding (code review, code inspection). A "no" means you can go faster, but at some risk.

I always thought of things like code reviews as semi pseudo-science in most cases. I've sat through meetings where developers obviously understand the code that they are reviewing, but where they didn't understand anything about the system as a whole. If your perfect function pulls on 800 external dependencies that you trust. Trust because it's too much of a hazzle to go through them. I'd argue that in this situation you don't understand your code at all. I don't think it matters and I certainly don't think I'm better than anyone else in this regard. I only know how things work when it matters.

If anything, I think AI will increase human understanding without the need to write computer unfriendly code like "Clean Code", "DRY" and so on.

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> If anything, I think AI will increase human understanding

How?

Have you met the average programmer on a thursday afternoon after a terrible week of little sleep, family issues and unnecessary meetings? When I'm in that state of mind myself I'm fairly confident that any LLM could explain my weeks work better than I could.

Code reviews are pseudo-science now? Computer unfriendly code? What are you talking about? Do you understand that this babble makes zero sense ? Are you one of those product managers who recently learned to vibe-code? If so, make sure your latest Replit project does not delete your production database..

Splitting your code up into multiple functions across multiple files is computer unfriendly code. It'll cause L1, L2 and L3 cache misses. Yet it's heailed as very human friendly and maintainable by Uncle Bob and his disciples. As far as code reviews go, do you have any form of evidence that it's not a pseudo science? If I look at our industry today, it's not like it's in better shape compared to where it was decades ago. Hell, some of our most important systems are still running COBOL. If all these methodologies and principles that people swear by actually worked, I'd argue that things would have improved over the previous 40 years.

I think AI is pretty terrible for a lot of things, and pretty great for a lot of things. Since I work in a NIS2 regulated field I can't have any form of agent running with any form of access. Which makes sense for any form of critical service we write, but I wouldn't have an issue having an AI deal with some "unimportant" internal application.

> Splitting your code up into multiple functions across multiple files is computer unfriendly code. It'll cause L1, L2 and L3 cache misses

I think you have no idea what you're talking about and trying to sound technical based on some concepts you misheard somewhere.

A lot of non-tech people got into "tech" in the last years not because they were passionate about technology but because they heard they could make more money there. This was possible due to VCs throwing around money at various software companies. As a result we get statements like yours. There is one thing that I am hopeful for with the AI bubble - which is the VCs panicking out because they think "everyone will vibecode an SaaS" - and pulling out of software companies investments, causing the folks like you to go back to whatever you were doing before and leaving software to people who actually know it and do it out of genuine interest and not primarily for the money.

You sure seem to assume a lot about me for someone who is so confidently incorrect. I wish you well, I suspect you may need it.

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