I saw an argument today that was presented in a very rage inducing way but in the end I had to agree that it wasn’t the worst of takes: your code won’t get any worse just because you let the infinite slop machine have a go at trying to find problems in it.
There could be a million other reasons not to use AI but if your only argument against it is that you don’t trust the code written by AI to be good enough to be included in your code base, then you’re just not thinking about every way that the clankers can be put to work.
I’m not arguing in favor of using AI by bringing this up. If you’re morally opposed to it then this point makes absolutely no difference.
AI for code review is, I am pained to admit, a genuinely extremely pleasant addition to my workflow - it inherently is a process that involves humans checking it’s work, and that kind of pattern recognition is one of the things that AI models are actually proficient at. It’s for sure not bullet proof and it’s pretty rare for it to catch something real that I wasn’t already aware of, but it takes no time, doesn’t touch my code directly and does pick up tiny errors like fenceposts or bad typing that make up the majority of my time when I’m running things down manually.
I trust it as far as I can code it. I use Claude to point out errors all day. I use it to take a lot of the tedious typing out and generally speed up the development process. I don’t use it to think for me. That would be stupid.
I saw an argument today that was presented in a very rage inducing way but in the end I had to agree that it wasn’t the worst of takes: your code won’t get any worse just because you let the infinite slop machine have a go at trying to find problems in it.
There could be a million other reasons not to use AI but if your only argument against it is that you don’t trust the code written by AI to be good enough to be included in your code base, then you’re just not thinking about every way that the clankers can be put to work.
I’m not arguing in favor of using AI by bringing this up. If you’re morally opposed to it then this point makes absolutely no difference.
AI for code review is, I am pained to admit, a genuinely extremely pleasant addition to my workflow - it inherently is a process that involves humans checking it’s work, and that kind of pattern recognition is one of the things that AI models are actually proficient at. It’s for sure not bullet proof and it’s pretty rare for it to catch something real that I wasn’t already aware of, but it takes no time, doesn’t touch my code directly and does pick up tiny errors like fenceposts or bad typing that make up the majority of my time when I’m running things down manually.
Almost all of my LLM usage is for that as well, I can’t wait for it to become more sustainable, but it’s definitely useful for that.
I trust it as far as I can code it. I use Claude to point out errors all day. I use it to take a lot of the tedious typing out and generally speed up the development process. I don’t use it to think for me. That would be stupid.