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sidrag22yesterday at 6:28 PM8 repliesview on HN

> fully understand every change and every single line of the code.

im probably just not being charitable enough to what you mean, but thats an absurd bar that almost nobody conforms to even if its fully handwritten. nothing would get done if they did. But again, my emphasis is on that im probably just not being charitable to what you mean.


Replies

Maxataryesterday at 6:46 PM

You're most likely being pedantic, like when someone says they understand every single line of this code:

    x = 0
    for i in range(1, 10):
      x += i
    print(x)
They don't mean they understand silicon substrate of the microprocessor executing microcode or the CMOS sense amplifiers reading the SRAM cells caching the loop variable.

They just mean they can more or less follow along with what the code is doing. You don't need to be very charitable in order to understand what he genuinely meant, and understanding code that one writes is how many (but not all) professional software developers who didn't just copy and paste stuff from Stackoverflow used to carry out their work.

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thomasmgyesterday at 6:33 PM

Well that is how it mostly worked until recently... unless if the developer copied and pasted from stackoverflow without understanding much. Which did happen.

satvikpendemyesterday at 6:40 PM

How is that an absurd bar? If you're handwriting code, you'd need to know what you actually want to write in the first place, hence you understand all the code you write. Therefore the code the AI produces should also be understood by you. Anything else than that is indeed vibe coding.

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sbarreyesterday at 6:42 PM

Could they have meant "every line of code being committed by the LLM" within the current scope of work?

That's how I read it, and I would agree with that.

andrewjvbyesterday at 6:34 PM

It's a good point. To me this really comes down to the economics of the software being written.

If it's low-stakes, then the required depth to accept the code is also low.

hunterpaynetoday at 12:37 AM

I do. If you don't, maybe you shouldn't be writing software professionally. And yes, I've written both DBs and compilers so I do understand what is happening down to the CMOS. I think what you are doing is just cope.

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raincoleyesterday at 7:24 PM

I mean "understanding it just like when you hand wrote the code in 2019."

Obviously I don't mean "understanding it so you can draw the exact memory layout on the white board from memory."

torben-friisyesterday at 7:25 PM

You don't understand every change you make in the PRs you offer for review?