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Comment by pull_my_finger | Hacker News Reader

When you review code, do you spend 2 minutes per line? That seems like a huge exaggeration of effort required

I probably review about 1k LoC worth of PRs / day from my coworkers. It certainly doesn't take me 33 hours (!!) to do so, so I must be one of those rockstar 10x superhero ninja engineers I keep hearing about.

Are your coworkers producing the code using LLMs? And what level of trust do you place in them?

For half my coworkers, their LLM code is better than their code.

That’s depressing. For 80% of my coworkers their LLM code is horrible. Only the seniors seem to use it well and not just spit out garbage

I think that goes back to whether they are programmers vs engineers.

Engineers will focus on professionalism of the end product, even if they used AI to generate most of the product.

And I'm not going by "title", but by mindset. Most of my fellow engineers are not - they are just programmers - as in, they don't care about the non-coding part of the job at all.

Depends - if it is from a human I find I can trust it a lot more. If it is large blobs from LLMs I find it takes more effort. But it was just a guess at an average to give an estimate of the effort required. I’d hope they spent more than 2 mins on some more complex bits.

Are you genuinely confident in a framework project that lands 19kloc generated PRs in one go? I’d worry about hidden security footguns if nothing else and a lot of people use this for their apps. Thankfully I don't use it, but if I did I'd find this really troubling.

It also has security implications - if this is normalised in node.js it would be very easy to slip in deniable exploits into large prs. It is IMO almost impossible to properly review a PR that big for security and correctness.

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