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Comment by sdevonoes | Hacker News Reader

Reviewing AI generated code at PR time is a bottleneck. It cancels most of the benefits senior leadership thinks AI offers (delivery speed).

There’s also this implicit imbalance engineers typically don’t like: it takes me 10 min to submit a complete feature thanks to Claude… but for the human reviewing my PR in a manual way it will take them 10-20 times that.

Edit: at the end real engineers know that what takes effort is a) to know what to build and why, b) to verify that what was built is correct. Currently AI doesn’t help much with any of these 2 points.

The inbetweens are needed but they are a byproduct. Senior leadership doesn’t know this, though.

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Indeed. My view as a CEO is, if you are still reviewing the code yourself then what use is it that you can produce a bunch of text at a faster rate?

I'd prefer people wrote good quality code and checked it as they went along... whilst allowing room for other stuff they didn't think of to come to the front. The production process of using LLMs is entirely different, in its current state I don't see the net benefit.

E.g. if you have a very crystalised vision of what you want, why would I want an engineer to use an LLM to write it, when the LLM can't do both raw production and review? Could this change? Sure. But there's no benefit for me personally to shift toward working that way now - I'd rather it came into existence first before I expose myself to incremental risk that affects business operations. I want a comprehensive solution.

Where are you CEO?

At a shitty company. The problem is - you cannot ship a large amount of code quickly in a perfect way. Positioning the problem as "what's the point of generating all this code so fast if I still need a warm body at the end making sure it's OK?" is hilarious.

Don't do that. Just ship it. Yes, good tests, linting, etc will help but if you really believe you don't need humans in the loop at all, at least for the time being, you are fucked.

But go ahead, buy the hype. Your agent swarm can build an operating system in 15 minutes and everything will just work. Cool.

Edit- I disagree with you, didn’t realize you weren’t Op

Also wow you gutted your original comment

You should lay off your engineering team and do it all in Lovable amigo.

This is what I don't understand about this policy. There's no way a senior has enough spare capacity to be the gate keeper on every PR made by AI below them. So now we are just making it so the senior people use more AI to keep up but now they're to blame for letting it happen.

It sounds like a piss poor deal for seniors unless senior engineer now means professional code reviewer.

That's amazon in a nutshell though. Create conflicting metrics for performance, push credit up and responsibility down, punish everyone below you for not meeting the double standards

> Create conflicting metrics for performance, push credit up and responsibility down, punish everyone below you for not meeting the double standards

This resonates with my experience.

The only thing you forgot is that you can also use the 12^H^H 14 leadership principles to argue whatever you want (and then the opposite of what you argued last month, still using the same leadership principles).

Got a project finished early? Well, you didn't insist on the highest standards. Made sure things were held to a high standard? Well, you weren't biased for action.

Were you a knowledge source for the entire team? Well, you weren't learning and being curious. Did you ask a lot of questions to learn everything? Well, then you weren't "are right a lot".

Did you think big and come up with an architecture that saved Amazon a lot of money? Then you weren't inventing and simplifying. Build something simple to get out out the door quick? Well, you weren't thinking big.

Did you act quickly without consulting others to fix an issue? Well you weren't earning trust. Did you consult people to make sure they were happy with the solution? Well you weren't biased for action.

Thats just a few examples, there's so many more

Very nice, I can imagine someone turning it into a little satirical webpage, which implements a kind of decision tree:

1. Choose from a set of challenge types (e.g. meeting a deadline, reliability)

2. Choose whether the challenge was "met" or "failed".

3. Choose whether you want to make the person look good or bad, by following/ignoring a principle.

4. Results: A list of relevant principles with short rationalizations.

I'm almost tempted to try, except perhaps I should treasure my ignorance.

If a tool like that gets popular enough that most employees are using it for office-politics, it might even start to deflate the whole Leadership Principles thing.

the key is to understand which LPs apply to your L+1 and which apply to you (hint: its not the fun ones)

I have always received my accolade and never seen that twisted in that way there, though. But that was during covid. And in Europe.

Most AI advocates I know believe this period, reviewing every line of code, will come to an end when models improve. So there will be no bottleneck. We will simply test and ship, with AI doing all the code and review.

Possibly, but it doesn't make sense to restructure things in advance of that actually happening, particularly since there's no roadmap for getting there right now.

They are already at this point - they just think the world needs to catch up. They don’t review the code most of the time. They believe it’s just a matter of becoming comfortable with the idea you don’t write code. Seems plenty of startups in SV are also doing this.

Like the fake facebook that had a security hole so severe every single participant had their API keys exposed?

Yep, that’s the most prominent example of a system built without code review I can also reach for. Whether all such systems also suffer critical flaws is another question entirely. And whether that matters is a further unknown.

Surely they know all this. They're worried about AI code degrading codebase quality, so they're putting on the brakes.

> Senior leadership doesn’t know this, though.

Well, you'd think senior leadership should know how their business and their people work.

LOL

to be fair senior engineering leads in the software world are like Voltaire's joke about the holy roman empire, neither holy, roman or an empire.

Despite the name not a lot of seniority, leadership or engineering going around

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