> Imagine taking a picture on autoshot mode and refusing to look at it. If the client doesn’t like it because it’s too bright, tweak the settings and shoot again, but never look at the output.

The output of code isn't just the code itself, it's the product. The code is a means to an end.

So the proper analogy isn't the photographer not looking at the photos, it's the photographer not looking at what's going on under the hood to produce the photos. Which, of course, is perfectly common and normal.

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kace91 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>The output of code isn't just the code itself, it's the product. The code is a means to an end.

I’ll bite. Is this person manually testing everything that one would regularly unit test? Or writing black box tests that he does know are correct because of being manually written?

If not, you’re not reviewing the product either. If yes, it’s less time consuming to actually read and test the damn code

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CuriouslyC 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I mostly ignore code, I lean on specs + tests + static analysis. I spot check tests depending on how likely I think it is for the agent to have messed up or misinterpreted my instructions. I push very high test coverage on all my projects (85%+), and part of the way I build is "testing ladders" where I have the agent create progressively bigger integration tests, until I hit e2e/manual validation.

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kace91 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>I spot check tests depending on how likely I think it is for the agent to have messed up or misinterpreted my instructions

So a percentage of your code, based on your gut feeling, is left unseen by any human by the moment you submit it.

Do you agree that this rises the chance of bugs slipping by? I don’t see how you wouldn’t.

And considering the fact that your code output is larger, the percentage of it that is buggy is larger, and (presumably) you write faster, have you considered the conclusion in terms of the compounding likelihood of incidents?

	▲	CuriouslyC 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There's definitely a class of bugs that are a lot more common, where the code deviates from the intent in some subtle way, while still being functional. I deal with this using benchmarking and heavy dogfooding, both of these really expose errors/rough edges well.

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straydusk 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"Testing ladders" is a great framing.

My approach is similar. I invest in the harness layer (tests, hooks, linting, pre-commit checks). The code review happens, it's just happening through tooling rather than my eyeballs.

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straydusk 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Exactly this. The code is an intermediate artifact - what I actually care about is: does the product work, does it meet the spec, do the tests pass?

I've found that focusing my attention upstream (specs, constraints, test harness) yields better outcomes than poring over implementation details line by line. The code is still there if I need it. I just rarely need it.

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alanbernstein 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Right, it seems the appropriate analogy is the shift from analog-photograph-developers to digital camera photographers.

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add-sub-mul-div 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A photo isn't going to fail next week or three months from now because it's full of bugs no one's triggered yet.

Specious analogies don't help anything.