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Comment by euthymiclabs | Hacker News Reader

"I read the code." -Mitchell Hashimoto

Great code needs great understanding and agents need excellent guidance. Even in my current solo-dev work, I can't imagine making a production commit I haven't read until I understand it. I own the consequences of my code; that's a responsibility AI agents can't take.

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Agreed with Reading! This alone isn't enough though. PreLLM too it wasn't just reading code to review. Someone did the hard work or crafting the code and each unit test would tell you the weird corner cases to deal with and factor that into changing your code. One person owned a part of the codebase and was an expert. Not to mention reading isnt easy when the velocity of code pumping in is 3-5x more. Its exhausting and reading becomes skimming.

So true. Writing the code was so helpful for learning what it meant. It takes much more investment to go back to the code LLMs write to figure out what's actually happening and weigh everything.

The expert is now outsourced to LLM. If someone asks me about a bug in a system I made N years ago, I usually have a hunch what the problem might be, now it feels I'm lost in my own codebase (even if I really read the code). Similar to why math books have exercises and not only explanations.

Guess it's not an issue as long as you have access to the models and someone who likes prompting.

Yeah, but in the corporate world now, you're being judged by how fast you get shit checked in. So, if you need to understand every line these days... you're going to end up in the bottom 25% of the company pretty quickly. Not saying you're wrong, just saying how fucked things are becoming.

Perverse incentives have always been the purview of bad management. Measuring things that don't cause success is easier than figuring out what actually matters. (It's also why I don't practice corporate medicine anymore.)

Conversely I'm a solo-dev and I ship a lot of slop I don't even look at. Granted my work is just basic CRUD apps, and I focus my efforts on validating important consequences (like does this break accounting invariants or something)

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