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Seems painfully obvious that, whatever you think about #genai code, anyone using it is heading for a code-review logjam. Assuming that the org requires code review; if yours doesn’t, nothing I can say will help you. Anyhow, Rishi Baldawa writes smart stuff about the problem and possible ways forward, in ˚The Reviewer Isn't the Bottleneck”: https://rishi.baldawa.com/posts/review-isnt-the-bottleneck/

[My prediction: A lot of orgs will *not* do smart things about this and will suffer disastrous consequences in the near future.]

Rishi Baldawa

The Reviewer Isn't the Bottleneck

AI tools are flooding PR queues and the instinct everywhere is to call review the bottleneck. I think that’s the wrong question. The reviewer is the last sync point before production changes. The goal shouldn’t be how to remove the gate, but how to make it cheaper to operate.

roland

@roland@devdilettante.com replied · 5 days ago

@timbray i don't think writing quality production level code is going to get faster any time soon. Sure you can write 1000s of lines of terrible code with LLMs in 10 minutes but so what that doesn't hep anybody.

roland

@roland@devdilettante.com replied · 5 days ago

Josh

@krnlg@mastodon.social replied · 7 days ago

@timbray
This is what I wonder about when it comes to some of the FOSS slopifications. Because sometimes Devs turn to AI to manage their workload being way too high, suffering from lack of volunteers and so forth, but will it actually help outside of the short term or will it end up making things worse?

Chris Ford :tw:

@cford@toot.thoughtworks.com replied · last week

@timbray If not reviewing is bad, and waiting for reviewers is infeasible, perhaps we could take another look at pairing?

Third spruce tree on the left

@tezoatlipoca@mas.to replied · 7 days ago

@cford @timbray

Every developer I've ever known (which is a LOT): NO

Listen, we all read 😜 from the trenches in the mid 00s and rushed off to try pair programming, and it lasted... like a week (the rest stuck). Noone likes having coworkers that close for that much (and thats not an indictment of developer hygene, its a personal space thing).

Chris Ford :tw:

@cford@toot.thoughtworks.com replied · 7 days ago

@tezoatlipoca @timbray It's pretty pervasive in my workplace, but I totally get it's not a universal preference.

Guillaume Rossolini

@GuillaumeRossolini@infosec.exchange replied · last week

@timbray

Curl shut down their bug bounty after six years

Huh? I often see Daniel ranting about this, sure, but I haven’t seen what they’re saying here, and their link doesn’t say that either

degenerating degenerate

@hopeless@mas.to replied · last week

@timbray FWIW the LLM knows a lot of best practices and bad-things-you're-not-supposed-to-do, that it doesn't pay attention to well when coding. It likes to do the minimum that meets what was asked with bad results for maintainability.

But it has seen, does know, what 'good code' would look like, so the exact same LLM that did the coding, can very usefully itself assess, critique and fix what it just emitted.

Tim Bray

@timbray@cosocial.ca replied · last week

@hopeless Well, the LLM is trained on all the code, good & bad, no? Not sure how it knows which is which.

degenerating degenerate

@hopeless@mas.to replied · last week

@timbray Same as a human, it has also read all the blog posts on "best practices" and "code smells".

Anyway don't take my word for it, open a fresh context and ask the LLM to assess the ways that (the code it wrote in a previous context) falls short of being maintainable and high quality, and to patch it to be better in those cases.

Chris Petrilli

@petrillic@hachyderm.io replied · last week

@timbray I am hearing peers in other companies being pushed by executives to abandon code review completely.

If you’re wondering how deep the psychosis goes.

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