Good catch on CTOs part. That scenario is one that keeps me awake at night -- that some large PR of mine has come functionality or feature that I didn't ask for and didn't notice.

How did the CTO respond to "Claude did it and I didn't catch it"? Did the AI PR summary mention it? Or did the CTO just read the code?

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hhh 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I am fighting against people doing this every day, and we've made it extremely clear that your computer and processes running on it are an extension of you, a human, who is responsible for the actions on your computer.

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Synthetic7346 2 days ago | parent [-]

Won't that slow you down a lot? I get it in principle, but in practice if you have to review everything your coding agent does the productivity gains diminish significantly

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extrabajs 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I guess you get to choose between reviewing it yourself or wasting someone else’s time

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pfannkuchen 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can’t tell if you are serious. Are you serious?

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NateEag 2 days ago | parent [-]

Whether or not he's serious, as someone who's grudgingly using Claude at work due to mandates, the productivity gains do shrink massively (and sometimes go negative) if you actually attempt to gain the level of understanding you'd have of the system had you written it yourself.

Does it matter if the developers understand the system they maintain?

I guess that depends whether the genAI maximalists turn out to be right.

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pfannkuchen 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

What happens when there’s an outage though? Just hope the LLM can fix it? Who is on the hook if it can’t?

Do you have people frantically trying to reverse engineer a basically unfamiliar-to-them code base at 2am while bleeding cash?

	▲	NateEag a day ago \| parent [-]
		As far as I can tell, yes, the workflow is "assume the LLM can fix it." I've certainly seen people on this site defend that idea vociferously. I won't tell you it's impossible - Claude does do legitimately amazing things. It does not, however, seem to me to actually have deep understanding of what it's doing. "Amazing" does not mean "admirable" or "trustworthy."

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pavel_lishin 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Does it matter if the developers understand the system they maintain?

Are they maintaining it if all they do is type prompts into Claude?

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NateEag a day ago | parent [-]

Yes, they are.

They may be doing a poor job of it - time will tell.

But, at present, they're still the ones merging PRs and deploying changes to production.

	▲	pavel_lishin a day ago \| parent [-]
		It brings to mind the Chinese Room argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room If a person in a Chinese Room doesn't actually understand Chinese, though the system as a whole behaves as if it does - can we say that the engineer merging PRs and deploying to production understands the system or maintains it?

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q3k 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Would you rather have one cookie now or two cookies later?

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evansjp 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

CTO responded well to it - frankly because we're all using some coding agent and it's just the natural process of code review for them to sniff things out. No mention of it in any PR summary - CTO found it in the migration that would mutate the User record to accept `null` email.