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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

> Or even that [AI] can do 100% of coding right now.

I don't actually think the article refutes this. But the AI needs to be in the hands of someone who can review the code (or astrophysics paper), notice and understand issues, and tell the AI what changes to make. Rinse, repeat. It's still probably faster than writing all the code yourself (but that doesn't mean you can fire all your engineers).

The question is, how do you become the person who can effectively review AI code without actually writing code without an AI? I'd argue you basically can't.

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> The question is, how do you become the person who can effectively review AI code without actually writing code without an AI? I'd argue you basically can't.

I agree, and I'd go a step further:

You can be the absolute best coder in the world, the fastest and most accurate code reviewer ever to live, and AI still produces bad code so much faster than you can review that it will become a liability eventually no matter what

There is no amount of "LLM in a loop" "use a swarm of agents" or any other current trickery that fixes this because eventually some human needs to read and understand the code. All of it.

Any attempt to avoid reading and understanding the code means you have absolutely left the realm of quality software, no exceptions

It isn't as binary as that. We already don't read all the code. When was the last time you checked the disassembly/IR of the programs you wrote? Very few will say recently. The others, despite not reading the entirety of the code, can still produce something with good quality.

Besides, it's not like QA ends at code analysis. In fact, that's pretty shallow for the field.

My boss decreed the other day that we’re all to start maximising our use of agents, and then set an accordingly ambitious deadline for the current project. I explained that being relatively early in my career I’ve been hesitant to use any kind of LLM so I can gain experience myself (to say nothing of other concerns), and yeah in his words I’ve “missed the opportunity”

Interesting, we only have generic 'use AI' in our goals. Though its generic framing probably indicates more company's belief in this tech than anything else.

Unfortunately in the majority of organizations, the idiots are at the wheels. It's not people with actual experience of how engineers do things, that dictates what those engineers should do.

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