Worse, you’re doing code review of poorly written code with random failure modes no human would create, and an increasingly big ball of mud that is unmaintainable over time. It’s just the worst kind of reviewing imaginable. The AI makes an indecipherable mess, and you have to work out what the hell is going on.

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bsimpson 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

There's been so much pressure to use AI at work.

My codebase is a zen garden I've been raking for 6 years. I have concerns about what's going to happen after a few months of "we're using AI cause they told us to."

	▲	theshrike79 17 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is the time to define your zen gardening style with formal tools. You know just the way you like it, right? Create an .editorconfig that describes the style, create linters and AST parsers that define your style in a concrete way. (You can actually create these with AI from your existing codebase btw =P) Then when the AI comes in, it has to use those tools to confirm whatever it produces conforms to the zen garden style you've defined. It's just tools in a loop. Give it the tools to determine what it did is up to par and it will do it. Peace and harmony for all.
	▲	rhubarbtree 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That must be so satisfying. I’ve heard the phrase “code farming” before, but I like the zen garden analogy. If the future is indeed AI, and I’m certainly hearing a lot of people using it extensively, then I think there has to be a mindset shift. Our job will change from craft to damage limitation. Our goal will be to manage a manic junior developer who produces a mixture of good code and slop without architectural level reasoning. Code will rot fast and correctness will hinge on testing as much as you can. It seems like a horrible future. However, it does seem to me that given decades we were unable to build good development practices. Our tooling is terrible. Most of our languages are terrible. Our solution was to let inexperienced devs create languages with all the same flaws, repeating the same mistakes. Web dev is a great example of inefficient software dev that has held the world to ransom. Maybe AI slop is payback for software developers.

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askafriend 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> The AI makes an indecipherable mess

Humans are perfectly capable of this themselves and in fact often do it...

	▲	rhubarbtree 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		That’s true, but the AI can make it bigger, faster, and more messy.