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Comment by tripleee | Hacker News Reader

> now that humans write less than 99% of code, the most important criteria for a language isn't readability

please tell me you're reading the AI code

I actually don't read any code! For generation I use simulations to ensure satisfactory error rates, for deterministic code I use test suites, and for user interfaces I use good ol' intuition! So I guess you could say I just write extra code that makes reading the code unnecessary. I find it quite strange to be honest! But this is the most effective way for me to ship now.

Have it run fuzz and test suites. Get with it man. Most of my LLM projects have massive test suites that do a far better job then I ever would have.

So you're fine with your code having unintended behaviour, as long as that unintended behaviour passes a test that the agent wrote?

My preferred approach is to read and understand everything the LLM produces AND have it create test suites (which I also read and understand). The LLM can help you with that too - just have it breakdown and explain the code at each iteration.

If it's code for a pacemaker, it should be reviewed by multiple humans. If it's code for an unimportant side project, I will never read it. Between those extremes are shades of grey.

Part of our job in this new era is to understand the worst-case consequences of a bug given how the code interacts with the world, then allocate our effort based on that understanding. This can only be done on a case by case basis.

If you don't, at a bare minimum, read the code once though, you don't know how it interacts with the world.

Did you look at those test suites? Sometimes they test nothing.

Yes, but not all - it has been a long time in my experience that frontier LLMs have written nonsense tests.

Not really. I test the output thoroughly, I examine the thinking process, I go through the diff to see if anything jumps out but I my thinking process/the way I work has changed. Low level programming thinking has gotten atrophied it seems.

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