(It's the delta that worries me in the code I see—the change in quality, that is. Engineers with a quarter century of experience churning out code by the bucketful that's quite a bit worse than what they used to write. So either they aren't reviewing their own code like they used to or their skills have degraded.)

@baldur This is precisely why I revived KScope for Qt6 after years of it languishing after the Qt4 port bit-rotted. The tool exists to aid human understanding. It is not relevant to any so-called "agentic development paradigm", nor is it intended to be. I continue to be more productive by rejecting LLM driven tools.

It is also 3-clause BSD licensed except for the forward port of KFileTreeView, which is LGPL2. There is no requirement for me to release source code which might be subject to IP theft via "training". A prototype Linux AppImage exists.

@baldur Or likely both. But we can fix all that by letting another LLM review the code 🤡

@baldur I'm pretty sure it's both.

@baldur I still remember (in the early days of chatbots) my brother insisting he reviews 100% of the output himself. Nowadays he doesn't even bother pretending anymore.

@chapter1 @baldur I took a pair programming class a couple of weeks ago, and one of the exercises was for two humans to pair with copilot, which I hadn't used before. It was striking how quickly it felt that actually reviewing the code was an unnecessary bottleneck and I was holding things up by spending a couple of minutes reviewing what had been generated in a couple of seconds. I felt like I couldn't justify making the other person wait unless there was an obvious mistake.

@trantion Strong opinion: if review feels like the bottleneck, review is the only part still doing engineering. Speed up everything else, never that. I built AyCode around it: agents run in parallel, you read every diff.

@trantion @chapter1 @baldur

The most critical failures in any system - particularly in code, where there is more than one way to achieve an objective - are the NON-OBVIOUS mistakes!!

The obvious mistakes are normally trivial!

@baldur The lack of self-review is the thing which really really upsets me about this torrent of slop - if the operators of the tool were at least as proud of the *output* as they are of their *use* of the tool then we might not be quite so inundated with crud.

@kinnison @baldur A generation of kaleidoscope-owners convinced that it makes them the most gifted stained-glass artists known to the craft.

@kinnison @baldur also suffering from this. And I do not know solution. E. g. customer needs feature by tomorrow. I can do it by tomorrow with agents accepting “eagle eye review” and customer happy. Or I can deep dive, understand things, use agents, have clean code and no customer.

As a passionate engineer I HATE it. Only ~10% of tasks I can do maintaining decent output quality.

Sadly, it’s not even about engineering. It’s unavoidable outcome of capitalism+LLMs.

@baldur reviewing code is hard - it is likely that no one is capable of reviewing slop and revising it up to "written by a good engineer" quality.

@baldur The most perplexing ones are those who confidently state that the models now produce code better than humans. Either they are all bots, or there are a lot of devs who have no idea what good code even is. The last year has been the worst in my career for encountered code quality.

@danielleigh @baldur My bet is on most of the humans they've worked with wanting to keep their professional integrity and keeping their principles.

@danielleigh @baldur I'm guessing you haven't worked at a place where the majority of code is written by people who just graduated or are still in college, the bulk of whom get fired/promoted somewhere else and replaced after three-six months. But this is how software is written at scale these days. I'm not defending the practice, it just is what it is.

@baldur
i've been strucked by what was saying a Microsoft engineer in one article on vibe-coding, that they were so busy prompting they didn't review anymore, lack the time to do it..
(noted that detail but don't have the source and don't remember it)

@bituur_esztreym I think I came across that same article recently but don't have at hand either.

@baldur are they even given the time to review..... velocity of code seems to be the new token maxing

@bosconet That's basically what I've been hearing.

@baldur @bosconet
Heard that "The AI stuff revealed to us that for the triangle of Good-Fast-Cheap, CEOs everywhere would choose Fast twice"

@baldur I had someone who I had respected quite a bit tell me that AI-generated code no longer needed abstractions that makes the code readable and I found that to be dumb in the face.

@baldur the way I see it you can let an LLM generate code or review it but not both. As a human I'm better at writing it and wrong review suggestions are way easier to ignore.

@baldur Yup, it is everywhere. So is Climate Change. AI is Climate Change denial.