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- Hacker News
- I’ve personally reached a point where if I’m saving time typing, but gaining back that time on reviewing and understanding, I may as well have just written the code most of the time. AI is great for boilerplate and learning, but my team has given up on trying to use the tool for entire implementationsby drudolph914
- > LLMs aren’t lazy. They don’t cut corners because a simpler solution feels good enough. If they know how to solve something thoroughly, they will.
This is a severe misunderstanding in how LLMs work..
I don't know how this got on my front page....
- > An LLM defaults to building when it should be buying. Not because it doesn’t know about existing libraries, it often mentions them, but because for an LLM, writing two hundred lines of implementation is the same cognitive effort as writing two lines of import.
Or maybe they are trained that way. It’s more tokens used and more money you need to pay.
by geraneum - If your plan is to not review and just have the LLM rewrite if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t sound like the rewrite is gonna be any better.by dap
- > The shortest path for the model is to implement it completely
Have you worked with LLMs??????????? “I disabled the test so it’s not run so now all the tests pass” is not a hypothetical it’s pretty common. LLMs frequently do shortcut learning. The reason why reviews are expensive is because you still need to do all the steps in order to understand if a shortcut is justified.
- We faced a lot of this this year. Eager new joinees sent 100s of lines of CLs to review to "improve" little things.
Not only did the new changes did not fix what they thought it would fix but it broke other things in unexpected ways.
I brought in two changes after that:
* I'm not reviewing/reading anything that you yourself did not read / test in the target environments properly. If all it takes is an LLM prompt, I could be issuing the same prompt to make my life easier.. and If you're sending a CL, you should be owning the code you send.
* Me being more involved in the design process so review burden itself becomes lower. A bit of pair programming from time to time helped too.
Not sure how things will turn out after this but so far they seem better.
by saidinesh5 - > LLMs aren’t lazy. They don’t cut corners because a simpler solution feels good enough. If they know how to solve something thoroughly, they will.
I don't know why they think this, but no? Perhaps it's badly expressed, but LLMs cut corners all the time. It's sort of their core fault really.
Anyway, I disagree with the core premise[1]. Re-writes are not cheap, because 1) code can be so bad it's unclear how to rewrite it[2], b) code can be so significant it's challenging to rewrite it (architectural choices, schemas, etc), and lastly if you're ever wanting to own your own code and not rent it from LLM companies, having it understandable by a human is still a goal worth working toward.
[1] To be fair, I think OP _might_ be talking about rewriting in the moment of the thing being built, but with some unspoken rule that once they think the change is good enough, then they are reviewing all the code? They don't make it clear..
[2] it's not even that hard. Write a test that exercises an end result and not the rule that causes that end result and 6 months later you've forgotten why the code is like that. I had to maintain a piece of software once where the primary form of tests were a bunch of snapshots of an end report being generated, based on some initial data input, mostly all unlabeled. The code was like "do this SQL query on table A and then take the second result". Why the second result? Your guess is as good as mine! I couldn't even work out why they were querying table A and not table B...
by SCdF - Writing blog posts has become cheap, making them sound human has become hard.by dmitrig01