alt Hacker NewsNot my observation. If you never look at the code and dont have basic guardrails in place (linters, architecture tests, some guidelines for best practices) - probably.
But as soon as you do minimal reviews and high-level corrections, applications turn out just fine.
Can there be bugs? Sure. That's the price of not reading or understanding every line. It should depend on the criticality of your software how much of these you tolerate and how much you don't (reviewing, understanding, testing everything 100% like you were used to if you had written it yourself will kill most if not all of your gained speed)
But I never got the impression of unmaintainability or unfixable bugs.
Actually the other side around: A really good cleanup pass, architectural changes, or bugfixes are seldom more than a few prompts and 2 hours away, provided your overall base is decent and you actually gave a fuck from the start.
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What I'm hearing is "thoroughly reviewing AI generated code would defeat the purpose, so we give it a cursory glance and it seems to be decent code", and that's my point - it does indeed seem to be decent code but I think we're all kicking the can down the road when we operate this way. If the alternative means there's no gain to be had by using LLMs to write code, so be it. Maybe that's the answer. Maybe we shouldn't be relying so much on AI to write our code.
I think LLMs are great for writing small snippets of code that really only have one "best answer" (something simple like writing an array to a CSV), and internal tools, where bugs and security vulnerabilities usually aren't a big deal.
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> Can there be bugs? Sure. That's the price of not reading or understanding every line.
I've yet to come across a human developer who's output would meet this standard, despite writing every line.
In fact, having an LLM review our code is catching quite a few bugs before it reaches QA.