alt Hacker NewsThis misses the best use of AI in my opinion, which is to gain understanding. Whst is this bit of code doing? Is there a risk of data leaking here? Are permissions enforced downstream of this function?
Code review can go much deeper now if you use AI to aggressively attack a PR combined with your human insight. Same for planning a feature:
Can I consolidate this logic to a shared function? Does the error surface to the user and are there any gaps? What preexisting functionality is affected by this PR? Can this query be made more efficient?
LLMs are great with focused questions, up and down abstraction layers and across all kinds of concerns. Stack up these focused concerns into a rich understanding of what you are doing or writing.
Understanding is the real output, code is the byproduct.
Replies
> LLMs are great with focused questions, up and down abstraction layers and across all kinds of concerns. Stack up these focused concerns into a rich understanding of what you are doing or writing.
I agree. This is much better advice than what the article tries to do, which is to give best practices around how to use or not use AI to code.
Agreed — I also always append to my agents.md — "If there are any technical choices available, please surface them to me so I can understand them and choose"
Wish I could upvote twice or something
> This misses the best use of AI in my opinion, which is to gain understanding. Whst is this bit of code doing? Is there a risk of data leaking here? Are permissions enforced downstream of this function?
Do I understand when I just let AI regurgitate the function and behavior of the code?
Do you need that analysis every time from an LLM? Those are things I’d expect anyone to grow out of pretty quickly once you get used to understanding code. Especially someone with Senior in their title.
Doing this may give you understanding but won’t really teach you how to understand. For students (as the article is focusing on them), the latter is equally important.
Closely related: one of the biggest AI superpowers I've found is testing. "Please implement a comprehensive unit testing suite for this, making sure to test ..."
You still have to check the work and shouldn't trust it blindly, but in my experience it's pretty damn good.
SOMEONE didn't read the article
> You code and you have the AI check your work. Treat it like a reviewer. That’s my advice in a sentence.
Bro you're giving the same advice as the article
Exactly, i so wish the narratives around LLMs in most fields were around how they can enable us to be better ourselves...
> Whst is this bit of code doing?
This only applies to bad code. A formal programmic language beats an informal language anytime. Why on earth would you translate an unambiguous formal language to English?
> Is there a risk of data leaking here?
> Are permissions enforced downstream of this function?
If you trust AI to give you that answer, you are going to run into serious issues.