captainkrtek
Joined 11 years ago
Joined 11 years ago
I've bounced back and forth on my feelings for AI and have landed in the realm of: - there are certain things it is exceptional at that humans cannot replicate. - there are certain things I do not want to use it for.
And review falls squarely in that first category. Similarly, it is exceptional at working through "low hanging fruit" type problems such as spotting inefficiencies, analyzing a profile to find flaws in software, etc.
In the US, it seems corruption is only allowed at the top. If you tried to bribe your way out of a traffic ticket as a regular person, you'd get in big trouble, then meanwhile the president pardons wealthy fraudsters [1].
Meanwhile, in countries like Russia, everyone can get in on the action. A colleague of mine told me if he were to get drafted to the war, he knew exactly how much to pay and who to pay off locally to get his name off the list. It's equal opportunity corruption.
[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/28/nikola-founder-trevor-milt...
I added a Claude skill (/gather-history) that consolidates the history of our session(s) specific to the change into a series of: decision log, involvement (how much did I write vs. AI, how many refinement iterations, reviews, etc.) that I can then include in the PR. So far this has been helpful for my colleagues to understand how I arrived at the change and how thoroughly it's been developed.
The idea that Claude/Cursor are the new high level programming language for us to work in introduces the problem that we're not actually committing code in this "natural language", we're committing the "compiled" output of our prompting. Which leaves us reviewing the "compiled code" without seeing the inputs (eg: the plan, prompt history, rules, etc.)
In the pre-gen-AI days, if an engineer put up a PR, it implied (somewhat) they wrote their code, reviewed it implicitly as they wrote it, and made choices (ie: why is this the best approach).
If Claude is just the new high level programming language, in terms of prompting in natural language, the challenge is that we're not reviewing the natural language, we're reviewing the machine code without knowing what the inputs were. I'm not sure of a solution to this, but something along the lines of knowing the history of the prompting that ultimately led to the PR, the time/tokens involved, etc. may inform the "quality" or "effort" spent in producing the PR. A one-shotted feature vs. a multi-iteration feature may produce the same lines of code and general shape, but one is likely to be higher "quality" in terms of minimal defects.
Along the same lines, when I review some gen-AI produced PR, it feels like I'm reading assembly and having to reverse how we got here. It may be code that runs and is perfectly fine, but I can't tell what the higher level inputs were that produced it, and if they were sufficient.
Google Glasses - dead
Apple Vision Pro - dead
FB/Meta x RayBan - dead soon(?)
It seems they can’t get over the social hurdle of having a camera strapped to your face, and the effects of that on people around you. I think the tech is neat, but not socially accepted as a concept to make it viable. My sister is big into tiktok and filming all the time, and it personally makes me hesitant to be nearby as I’m not comfortable being filmed all the time.