It’s all the fucking job is now
I long for the days when I reviewed something, noticed an issue, commented, the recieving engineer learned something and we all got better as a result
Now I basically get the privilege of wasting 10 mins and telling someone they fucked up in a way unfathomable to them, because they haven’t got a clue what they just put in front of me
Oh and it’s my manager’s manager doing it
i needed this laugh 😂😂😂
They are if you want functional code.
Yes and it’s a giant bottleneck.
What’s depressing is that the AI agents are actually way better than humans at catching weird edge cases that are easy to overlook. So the AI code reviews are actually super valuable.
But it’s still an LLM and still doesn’t understand anything and can’t be accountable, so humans are still in the picture and that slows everything down.
All that, I think, is fine. The true problem I’m seeing is that reviewers are starting to get lazy and sign off on things because the AI gave it a pass.
I think it’s fine to lean on the AI to catch weird race conditions. It’s less fine to blindly accept that 2 lines of code requires a 12 line comment explaining a bunch of bullshit about what the code used to do.
Standards are dropping. It feels like a race: will developers become incompetently lazy before the AI is actually good enough to do their old jobs?
Yes, but the situation is getting strange.
Our model has always been that the reviewer is responsible for protecting the repository. This led to one IC getting fired for “letting in” a catastrophic bug his teammate generated with Claude.
I’m sorry that you work at a company that thinks code reviews and tests guarantee bug-free code.
The primary function of code reviews is to increase visibility, and therefore maintainability. It keeps other members of the team in the loop about how codebase is changing and how it might affect their current or future work.
The primary function of tests is to catch regressions, not new bugs, and especially not new bugs related to use cases that weren’t even possible in previous versions
Code reviews are not only still a thing in the age of AI but they are even more important now because you have to catch the AI on their lies and BS and that can sometimes be hard.
We’re all AI babysitters now. For a baby that never learns anything.
The biggest things I can see are:
- the AI just pumps out text. There’s a bias for producing more code, when something more succinct or terse or a workaround exists
- the AI has little idea of standards and usually doesn’t have the architectural context in mind. This produces solutions in the local maximum and not the global maximum. Maybe there are other places that feed more context into the model/provide examples that make it better.
So basically, it writes junior level code which is fine but it needs serious review by someone who has seen better examples. I fight with AI models all the time when they provide snippets because I’ve seen a bunch of different implementations and know how to poke it.
Also, we should keep in mind that these models are going to get super expensive soon, so the scope of use cases that are worthwhile will drop
It depends on the company. If the company is run by morons, they’ll have the AI do the code reviews.
We don’t really use AI lol. It’s great for the simple task - but I use it for giving me tldr on documentation than anything now. It’s basically a better Google
I guess the need is going to only increase !
