Mastodawn

Seems painfully obvious that, whatever you think about #genai code, anyone using it is heading for a code-review logjam. Assuming that the org requires code review; if yours doesn’t, nothing I can say will help you. Anyhow, Rishi Baldawa writes smart stuff about the problem and possible ways forward, in ˚The Reviewer Isn't the Bottleneck”: https://rishi.baldawa.com/posts/review-isnt-the-bottleneck/

[My prediction: A lot of orgs will *not* do smart things about this and will suffer disastrous consequences in the near future.]

The Reviewer Isn't the Bottleneck

AI tools are flooding PR queues and the instinct everywhere is to call review the bottleneck. I think that’s the wrong question. The reviewer is the last sync point before production changes. The goal shouldn’t be how to remove the gate, but how to make it cheaper to operate.

Rishi Baldawa

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degenerating degenerate Mar 10

@timbray FWIW the LLM knows a lot of best practices and bad-things-you're-not-supposed-to-do, that it doesn't pay attention to well when coding. It likes to do the minimum that meets what was asked with bad results for maintainability.

But it has seen, does know, what 'good code' would look like, so the exact same LLM that did the coding, can very usefully itself assess, critique and fix what it just emitted.

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Tim Bray Mar 10

@hopeless Well, the LLM is trained on all the code, good & bad, no? Not sure how it knows which is which.

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degenerating degenerate

@timbray Same as a human, it has also read all the blog posts on "best practices" and "code smells".

Anyway don't take my word for it, open a fresh context and ask the LLM to assess the ways that (the code it wrote in a previous context) falls short of being maintainable and high quality, and to patch it to be better in those cases.