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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

I just have my LLM read the PR, then give me a summary of what the PR is about, how important it is, and how good the PR itself actually is. Then I have a conversation with the LLM about specific points, especially things where I get that feeling that I don't have a 100% understanding.

Until I fully understand what's going on, the PR doesn't move and my interrogation of the LLM doesn't end. My interaction is littered with "Explain X" and "How does this square with Y?" and "What if Z happens?"

The interrogation is the point, without me having to wade through hundreds of lines of irrelevant code to get at the meat of the matter.

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Using an LLM to review the correctness of the work done by an LLM and expecting deterministic results must be some new definition of insanity.

For real. I mean aren't people supposed to be smart here? This is brain decay in action.

Personally I'm starting to see less and less "smart" people here, given how easily and quickly everyone jumps on random hype trains with very little investigation or thought put into it. And those who do investigate and put thought into it are then quickly down voted for being a hater. This forum has turned into almost like a FOMO echo chamber in a way.

Doing what is rewarded is a kind of smartness in itself - even if the thing that's rewarded is being dumb.

It depends on what you mean by smart.

I can read the room. Coding is going to go the way of some other disciplines where machines do most of the detail work and and we know stuff works by verification. There are other fields like this.

Do I like it or not? That doesn't really matter. I need a job, so I'm going to get good at the new way to ensure I continue to have a job. I consider this to be a smart thing to do for myself and my family.

I agree with the work changing more towards verification, but if the verification is one LLM reviewing another one, then that isn't really verification. At best you "assume", but you don't "verify".

Unfortunately I see a lot of (senior as well) engineers who think that just a vanilla LLM reviewing another LLM is sufficient, and my comment was directed towards those. If however you see the LLM era as needing more test support and systems than ever before in the form E2E tests and so forth, where "code review" as such becomes mostly irrelevant as you have such a strong test system in place that if that passes you can be sure it doesn't break anything for users, then yes, that's good.

What I mean is verification through testing, and perhaps other more formal means. This has happened to other engineering domains, yet us programmers have so much hubris that we think it can't happen to us. And everyone is throwing their toys out the cot because it looks like it is actually going to happen.

Code reviews may not even happen, or if they do, it'll be all automated, and the verification will be the key.

Ask anyone in the semiconductor industry when last they understood the design of those things.

You're not going to get deterministic results.

It's very easy to argue with stawman arguments.

At this point, what is a human dev even there for?

We have this at work : fully AI-generated code and description. People will give review comments generated by AI which the "author" replies with an AI-generated response, all with LLM wording full of jargons no one understands not even the person who sent it. When you ask them what they meant, yeah idk Claude said so

The human is there as the control valve, the one who keeps the overall context, and the one who injects actual creativity.

Every time the LLM throws jargon around, you call it. "What do you mean by gated wedge?" You call its bullshit, check what it's saying against your understanding of the overall system, and keep it on the straight and narrow.

It's a lot like supervising a junior dev who happens to be very quick at absorbing lots of info, but not so great at the big picture.

Meat proxy.

Why would I do that? It's the job of the person sending me the PR to explain what they're trying to do. I'm done wading through AI slop.

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