And now you spend the same time verifying/reviewing AI output?

yomismoaqui 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

If before I did a thing in 60 minutes and now Claude Code does it in 5 minutes I will not spend 55 minutes reviewing that code.

I will maybe spend 5-10 minutes reviewing and refining the code with the help of Claude Code and then the rest of the time I will go for another feature/bugfix.

	▲	potatolicious 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Worth adding that sometimes I will spend an ~equivalent amount of time doing something in Claude Code, but the result is better. Case in point recently I was working on a mobile app where I had to check for a whole litany of user permissions and present UI to the user if any particular permission was missing, including instructions on how to rectify it. Super annoying to do manually, but Claude Code was not only able to exhaustively enumerate all possible combos of missing permissions, but also automatically create the UIs for each edge case. I reviewed all of it for accuracy, which took some time. I probably would've missed some of the more obscure edge cases on my own. Overall maybe not much faster than doing it myself, but I'm pretty sure the results were substantially better.

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tptacek 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I spend a fraction of the time verifying LLM production of rote code --- which I do in fact do, I'm not a vibe coder --- than I would writing it. I don't understand why people always expect this to be a mic drop rebuttal.

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boredtofears 3 days ago | parent [-]

Do you feel like you end up with as clear of a mental model reviewing it as you do if you wrote it?

I'm still trying to figure out the answer to that question for myself. Maybe the answer is, "Probably not, and it probably doesn't matter" but I'm still trying to figure out what kind of downstream effects that may have later on my judgment.

	▲	tptacek 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, of course I do. It's rote stuff. To the balance of time we're accruing to me dealing with generated code, add "stripping off all the comments", "fixing variable names to be like I like them", etc. My fingerprints are still all over everything. And it's still radically faster than doing this all by hand. Mental expenditure on programming is also not linear through a task; it takes much more energy to get started than to do the back half. Ever stared at an empty function for a minute trying to come up with the right variable name, or choosing which value to compute first? LLMs are geniuses at just getting things started.