alt Hacker NewsSo what do you think of Discord rewriting in rust, and AWS shipping an emulator that was ai generated? Do you think those were done with small prs? Do you think that it's bad they did those things?
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I, personally, would certainly argue that those should be done in small PRs. If you have a working application and want to rewrite in rust, I would expect it to be done by replacing individual components one at a time while making sure relevant tests keep passing. If you're making a new application, I would expect it to be built incrementally by adding parts incrementally.
I think they could do those things with small PRs if they chose. If their agents are not intelligent enough to make small prs, I guess they can YOLO and assume everything is just fine with what the agents did. I do think small PRs would be better for agent review as well though, because they avoid any problems with context being overwhelmed and things being missed/forgotten.
What are the PRs you're thinking of though. If you mean a full clean rewrite, they'd probably proceed with spec first then just write it in bits to the spec. No reason it has to be large prs or smaller that's a design choice.
Often an exercise I find useful is do a quick big PR, then split it into small chunks that make sense independently for review. Or you can chain prs. Both those things can be done.
You're welcome to do large PRs, I'm not a fan of huge PRs though and would not pretend to review them (as pretending is what it would be), nor would I like to work somewhere where this is the culture.
Please add your own thoughts to the conversation rather than aggressively asking rhetorical questions. "Counterexamples exist" is hardly a valid criticism of another human's perspective.