alt Hacker News"Yup, looks good to me!" said the human reviewing thousands of lines of generated code everyday.
This has become common now, and I've seen it ruin large projects until nobody understands the codebase full of verbose nonsensical code and comments. It becomes impossible to further develop the project without AI. Contributors not using AI for any reason are all leaving because no one enjoys working with mindless robots (and humans) as colleagues. It's demeaning and devaluing their labor and humanity. They're not getting "left behind", they are leaving the madness of crowds behind.
> ..the possibility of runaway dynamics: once a critical threshold is crossed, small increases in adoption can trigger rapid population-level shifts toward *persistent dependence, with abrupt losses in cognitive competence*.
We can all see it happening. As this technology permeates society, the challenge to maintain control, coherence, and quality will become greater and ever more serious - for example, AI in healthcare, military, management and governance.
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I hope there's still value to be found in a bunch of developers standing around a whiteboard and talking, and I think this scenario is where their ability and understanding really shows these days.
If we don't value that though--if we don't value understanding the system and just thinking through problems as a group--then let's stop pretending and just not do code reviews. Probably nobody cares and just types "LGTM" after having their own LLM do a spot check to cover their ass.
It's really easy to push developers to stop caring. If management says "go fast fast fast, use those LLMs!", then developers can't keep up, get frustrated, stop understanding the system, and at that point they're just there to collect a paycheck before society collapses. Or, if management is making dumb decisions all the time, same thing.
Hopefully as implementing ideas takes less and less time and resources, smart people who actually care will start building things with other smart people who care.
I've had someone approve my PRs within a minute of me opening them, and likewise expect immediate approvals on his own PRs. When asked questions about parts of the code sometimes the answer would be along the lines of "Claude did it this way", or verbose AI-generated responses to the question.
To be fair, models are more accurate than how they were earlier this year. In march I was still frustrated and was writing my own event loops because the model simply wasn't built for it. By January I was still hand checking statistical outputs to make sure it wasn't making any errors, and it was. After august it was pretty much over. There were no stats errors, code generated was shit but it could do what is asked. Instruction following is still a problem, and I sometimes catch silly things in the scrolling diffs, but it has been much easier since then.
Even if the human's judgement is correct in every LGTM, there's a bias towards merging. Each merge that adds a feature but degrades understandability 1% will be merged. It won't be held back until it improves it by 5% instead. After 100 merges you have degraded understandability 100% even though nobody made an error.