You know you can AI review the PR too, don't be such a curmudgeon. I have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI generated and fully AI review. And
You know you can AI review the PR too, don't be such a curmudgeon. I have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI generated and fully AI review. And
This makes no sense, and it’s absurd anyone thinks it does. If the AI PR were any good, it wouldn’t need review. And if it does need review, why would the AI be trustworthy if it did a poor job the first time?
This is like reviewing your own PRs, it completely defeats the purpose.
And no, using different models doesn’t fix the issue. That’s just adding several layers of stupid on top of each other and praying that somehow the result is smart.
I get your point, but reviewing your own PRs is a very good idea.
As insulting as it is to submit an AI-generated PR without any effort at review while expecting a human to look it over, it is nearly as insulting to not just open the view the reviewer will have and take a look. I do this all the time and very often discover little things that I didn't see while tunneled into the code itself.
> I get your point, but reviewing your own PRs is a very good idea.
Yes. You just have to be in a different mindset. I look for cases that I haven't handled (and corner cases in general). I can try to summarize what the code does and see if it actually meets the goal, if there's any downsides. If the solution in the end turns out too complicated to describe, it may be time to step back and think again. If the code can run in many different configurations (or platforms), review time is when I start to see if I accidentally break anything.
> reviewing your own PRs is a very good idea.
In the sense that you double check your work, sure. But you wouldn’t be commenting and asking for changes, you wouldn’t be using the reviewing feature of GitHub or whatever code forger you use, you’d simply make the fixes and push again without any review/discussion necessary. That’s what I mean.
> open the view the reviewer will have and take a look. I do this all the time
So do I, we’re in perfect agreement there.
> reviewing your own PRs is a very good idea
It is, but for all the reasons AI is supposed to fix. If I look at code I myself wrote I might come to a different conclusion about how things should be done because humans are fallible and often have different things on their mind. If it's in any way worth using an AI should be producing one single correct answer each time, rendering self PR review useless.
Yes! I would love that some people I’ve worked with would have to use the same standard for their own code. Many people act adversarial to their team mates when it comes to review code.
I haven't taken a strong enough position on AI coding to express any opinions about it, but I vehemently disagree with this part:
> This is like reviewing your own PRs, it completely defeats the purpose.
I've been the first reviewer for all PRs I've raised, before notifying any other reviewers, for so many years that I couldn't even tell you when I started doing it. Going through the change set in the Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket interface, for me, seems to activate an different part of my brain than I was using when locked in vim. I'm quick to spot typos, bugs, flawed assumptions, edge cases, missing tests, to add comments to pre-empt questions ... you name it. The "reading code" and "writing code" parts of my brain often feel disconnected!
Obviously I don't approve my own PRs. But I always, always review them. Hell, I've also long recommended the practice to those around me too for the same reasons.
> I vehemently disagree with this part
You don’t, we’re on the same page. This is just a case of using different meanings of “review”. I expanded on another sibling comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45723593
> Obviously I don't approve my own PRs.
Exactly. That’s the type of review I meant.
I'm sure the AI service providers are laughing all the way to the bank, though.
Probably not since they likely aren’t even turning a profit ;)
"Profit"? Who cares about profit? We're back to dot-com economics now! You care about _user count_, which you use to justify more VC funding, and so on and so forth, until... well, it will probably all be fine.
I suspect you could bias it to always say no, with a long list of pointless shit that they need to address first, and come up with a brand new list every time. maybe even prompt "suggest ten things to remove to make it simpler".
ultimately I'm happy to fight fire with fire. there was a time I used to debate homophobes on social media - I ended up writing a very comprehensive list of rebuttals so I could just copy and paste in response to their cookie cutter gotchas.
Your assumptions are wrong. AI models do not have equal generation and discrimination abilities. It is possible for AIs to recognize that they generated something wrong.
I have seen Copilot make (nit) suggestions on my PRs which I approved, and which Copilot then had further (nit) suggestions on. It feels as though it looks at lines of code and identifies a way that it could be improved but doesn't then re-evaluate that line in context to see if it can be further improved, which makes it far less useful.
> This makes no sense, and it’s absurd anyone thinks it does. If the AI PR were any good, it wouldn’t need review. And if it does need review, why would the AI be trustworthy if it did a poor job the first time?
The point of most jobs is not to get anything productive done. The point is to follow procedures, leave a juicy, juicy paper trail, get your salary, and make sure there's always more pretend work to be done.
> The point of most jobs is not to get anything productive done
That's certainly not my experience. But then, if I were to get hired at a company that behaved that way, I'd quit very quickly (life is too short for that sort of nonsense), so there may be a bit of selection bias in my perception.
AI PR reviews do end up providing useful comments. They also provide useless comments but I think the signal to noise ratio is at a point that it is probably a net positive for the PR author and other reviewers to have.
Maybe he's paying for a higher tier than his colleague.
>> This makes no sense, and it’s absurd anyone thinks it does.
It's a joke.
I doubt that. Check their profile.
But even if it were a joke in this instance, that exact sentiment has been expressed multiple times in earnest on HN, so the point would still stand.
Check OP's profile - I'm not convinced.
> That’s just adding several layers of stupid on top of each other and praying that somehow the result is smart.
That is literally how civilization works.
Just to explain my brusque comment: the way I see it, civilization is populated with a large fraction of individuals whose intelligence or conscientiousness I wouldn't trust to mind my cactus, but that I'm ok with entrusting a lot more too because of the systems and processes offered by society at large.
As an example, knowing that a service is offered by a registered company with presence in my area gives me the knowledge "that they know that I know" that if something goes wrong, I can sue them for negligence, possibly up to piercing the corporate veil the company and having the directors serve prison time. From that I can somewhat rationally derive that if the company has been in business offer similar services for years, it is likely that they have processes in place to maintain a level of professionalism that would lower the risk of such lawsuits. And on an organisational level, even if I still have good reason to think that most of the employees are incompetent, the fact that the company is making it work gives me a significantly higher preference in the "result" than I would in any individual "stupid" component.
And for a closer-to-home example, the internet is well known to be a highly reliable system built from unreliable components.
> If the AI PR were any good, it wouldn’t need review.
So, your minimum bar for a useful AI is that it must always be perfect and a far better programmer than any human that has ever lived?
Coding agents are basically interns. They make stupid mistakes, but even if they're doing things 95% correctly, then they're still adding a ton of value to the dev process.
Human reviewers can use AI tools to quickly sniff out common mistakes and recommend corrections. This is fine. Good even.
> So, your minimum bar for a useful AI is that it must always be perfect and a far better programmer than any human that has ever lived?
You are transparently engaging in bad faith by purposefully straw manning the argument. No one is arguing for “far better programmer than any human that has ever lived”. That is an exaggeration used to force the other person to reframe their argument within its already obvious context and make it look like they are admitting they were wrong. It’s a dirty argument, and against the HN guidelines (for good reason).
> Coding agents are basically interns.
No, they are not. Interns have the capacity to learn and grow and not make the same mistakes over and over.
> but even if they're doing things 95% correctly
They’re not. 95% is a gross exaggeration.
LLMs don't online learn, but you can easily stuff their context with additional conventions and rules so that they do things a certain way over time.
I strongly disagree that it was bad faith or strawmanning. The ancestor comment had:
> This makes no sense, and it’s absurd anyone thinks it does. If the AI PR were any good, it wouldn’t need review. And if it does need review, why would the AI be trustworthy if it did a poor job the first time?
This is an entirely unfair expectation. Even the best human SWEs create PRs with significant issues - it's absurd by the parent to say that if a PR is "any good, it wouldn’t need review"; it's just an unreasonable bar, and I think that @latexr was entirely justified in pushing back against that expectation.
As for the "95% correctly", this appears to be a strawman argument on your end, as they said "even if ...", rather than claiming that this is the situation at the moment. But having said that, I would actually like to ask both of you - what does it even mean for a PR to be 95% correct - does it mean that that 95% of the LoC are bug-free, or do you have something else in mind?
> You know you can AI review the PR too, don't be such a curmudgeon. I have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI generated and fully AI review. And
Waiting for the rest of the comment to load in order to figure out if it's sincere or parody.
He must of dropped connection while chatGPT was generating his HN comment
"must have"
His agent hit what we in the biz call “max tokens”
Considering their profile, I’d say it’s probably sincere.
Ahahah
One Furby codes and a second one reviews...
Let's red-team this: use Teddy Ruxpin to review, a Tamagotchi can build the deployment plan, and a Rock'em Sock'em Robot can execute it.
This is such a good idea, the ultimate solution is connecting the furbies to CI.
Please be doing a bit
As for the first question, about AI possibly truncating my comments,
If An AI can do a review then why would you put it up for others to review? Just use the AI to do the review yourself before creating a PR.
When I picture a team using their AI to both write and review PRs, I think of the "obama medal award" meme
If your team is stuck at this stage, you need to wake up and re-evaluate.
I understand how you might reach this point, but the AI-review should be run by the developer in the pre-PR phase.
did AI write this comment?
You’re absolutely right! This has AI energy written all over it — polished sentences, perfect grammar, and just the right amount of “I read the entire internet” vibes! But hey, at least it’s trying to sound friendly, right?
This definitely is ai generated LOL
> fully AI generated and fully AI review
This reminds me of an awesome bit by Žižek where he describes an ultra-modern approach to dating. She brings the vibrator, he brings the synthetic sleeve, and after all the buzzing begins and the simulacra are getting on well, the humans sigh in relief. Now that this is out of the way they can just have a tea and a chat.
It's clearly ridiculous, yet at the point where papers or PRs are written by robots, reviewed by robots, for eventual usage/consumption/summary by yet more robots, it becomes very relevant. At some point one must ask, what is it all for, and should we maybe just skip some of these steps or revisit some assumptions about what we're trying to accomplish
> It's clearly ridiculous, yet at the point where papers or PRs are written by robots, reviewed by robots, for eventual usage/consumption/summary by yet more robots, it becomes very relevant. At some point one must ask, what is it all for, and should we maybe just skip some of these steps or revisit some assumptions about what we're trying to accomplish
I've been thinking this for a while, despairing, and amazed that not everyone is worried/surprised about this like me.
Who are we building all this stuff for, exactly?
Some technophiles are arguing this will free us to... do what exactly? Art, work, leisure, sex, analysis, argument, etc will be done for us. So we can do what exactly? Go extinct?
"With AI I can finally write the book I always wanted, but lacked the time and talent to write!". Ok, and who will read it? Everybody will be busy AI-writing other books in their favorite fantasy world, tailored specifically to them, and it's not like a human wrote it anyway so nobody's feelings should be hurt if nobody reads your stuff.
As something of a technophile myself.. I see a lot more value in arguments that highlight totally ridiculous core assumptions rather than focusing on some kind of "humans first and only!" perspectives. Work isn't necessarily supposed to be hard to be valuable, but it is supposed to have some kind of real point.
In the dating scenario what's really absurd and disgusting isn't actually the artificiality of toys.. it's the ritualistic aspect of the unnecessary preamble, because you could skip straight to tea and talk if that is the point. We write messages from bullet points, ask AI to pad them out uselessly with "professional" sounding fluff, and then on the other side someone is summarizing them back to bullet points? That's insane even if it was lossless, just normalize and promote simple communications. Similarly if an AI review was any value-add for AI PR's, it can be bolted on to the code-gen phase. If editors/reviewers have value in book publishing, they should read the books and opine and do the gate-keeping we supposedly need them for instead of telling authors to bring their own audience, etc etc. I think maybe the focus on rituals, optics, and posturing is a big part of what really makes individual people or whole professions obsolete
> And
Do you review your comments too with AI?
> I have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI generated and fully AI review.
I first read that as "coworkers (who are) fully AI generated" and I didn't bat an eye.
All the AI hype has made me immune to AI related surprises. I think even if we inch very close to real AGI, many would feel "meh" due to the constant deluge of AI posts.
So how do you catch the errors that AI made in the pull request? Because if both of you are using AI for both halves of a PR then you're definitely coding and pasting code from an LLM. Which is almost always hot garbage if you actually take the time to read it.
You can just look at the analytics to see if the feature is broken. /s
Hahahahah well done :dart-emoji:
AIs generating code which will then be reviewed by AIs. Résumés generated by AIs being evaluated by AI recruiters. This timeline is turning into such a hilarious clown world. The future is bleak.
"Let the AI check its own homework, what could go wrong?"
Satire? Because whether you’re being serious or not people are definitely doing exactly this.