> only a skilled developer who's thinking critically, and comfortable operating at the architectural level, can spot issues in the thousands of lines of generated code, before they become a problem.

An additional factor: to find issues in generated code, the developer has to care. Many developers (especially at big firms) are already profoundly checked out from their work and are just looking for a way to close their tickets and pass the buck with the minimum possible effort. Those developers - even the capable ones - aren't going to put in the effort to understand their generated code well enough to find issues that the agents missed. Especially during the current AI-driven speed mania.

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lgrapenthin 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Indeed. Generated code is also harder to read because it violates all semantic expectations that rely on the mental model of a human author. A generated piece of code is linguistically plausible but often unknowingly imitates common idioms so incoherently that the actual bug may be accidentally disguised in a way no sane human (even a bad programmer) could have come up with.

Since LLMs have no internal evaluation, as a reviewer one has to account for it and evaluate line by line, rebuild from scratch any hidden rationale and tacit knowledge the LLM didn't have in the first place - only to be mislead into non concerns draining costly hours.

At this point, the investment is often deeper than writing from scratch.

	▲	WorldMaker an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I tried to capture some of my feelings on this on a recent personal blog post/rant. The easiest phrase is that LLMs are "legacy code as a service". They are trained on other people's legacy code. (No one is intentionally feeding LLMs their best proprietary code.) They produce output that is "Day 1 Legacy Code" in the sense that there's no human code owner to take responsibility and you might be able to ask the LLM that built it questions, but it is easier to accept is as the LLM that wrote it is no longer at the company (between context/memory limitations and regular model upgrades/retrainings, etc). But also, yeah, it starts to get worse than classic legacy code because you could try to build a theory of mind about the legacy code author(s). There were skills in trying to "mind read" a past generation. To find clues in poetry words more than the poetry form. (The variable names and whatever comments may have survived including commit logs; things written for humans to help explain the whys/hows, not just the whats.)

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awakeasleep 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are exceptions to this, but in big firms many developers on many teams are actually punished for caring.