We know from experimentation that agents will change anything that isn’t nailed down. No natural language spec or test suite has ever come close to fully describing all observable behaviors of a non-trivial system.
This means that if no one is reviewing the code, agents adding features will change observable behaviors.
This gets exposed to users as churn, jank, and broken work flows.
2. Assuming that techniques that work with human developers that have severely impaired judgement but are massively faster at producing code is a bad idea.
3. There’s no way you have enough experience with maintaining code written in this way to confidently hand wave away concerns.
So many people on HN are so insulted that the people who put money in our bank accounts and in some cases stock in our brokerage accounts ever cared about their bespoke clean code, GOF patterns and they never did. LLM just made it more apparent.
It’s always been dumb for PR to be focused on for loops vs while loops instead of focusing on whether functional and non functional requirements are met
Speak for yourself. I don't hire people like you.
Even in late 2023 with the shit show of the current market, I had no issues having multiple offers within three weeks just by reaching out to my network and companies looking for people with my set of skills.
You sound like a bozo, I can sniff it through my screen.
Guess what? I also stopped caring how registers are used and counting clock cycles in my assembly language code like it’s the 80s and I’m still programming on a 1Mhz 65C02
But do you look at any of the AI output? Or is it just "it works, ship it"?
What I checked.
1. The bash shell scripts I had it write as my integration test suite
2. To make sure it wasn’t loading the files into Postgres the naive way -loading the file from S3 and doing bulk inserts instead of using the AWS extension that lets it load directly from S3. It’s the differ xe between taking 20 minutes and 20 seconds.
3. I had strict concurrency and failure recovery requirements. I made sure it was done the right way.
4. Various security, logging, log retention requirements
What I didn’t look at - a line of the code for the web admin site. I used AWS Cognito for authentication and checked to make sure that unauthorized users couldn’t use the website. Even that didn’t require looking at the code - I had automated tests that tested all of the endpoints.
I've witnessed human developers produce incredibly convoluted, slow "ETL pipelines" that took 10+ minutes to load single digit megabytes of data. It could've been reduced to a shell script that called psql \copy.