[dubbel]

You are looking at LLMs for code generation exclusively, but that is not the only application within software engineering.

In my company some people are using LLMs to generate some of their code, but more are using them to get a first code review, before requesting a review by their colleagues.

This helps getting the easy/nitpicky stuff out of the way and thereby often saves us one feedback+fix cycle.

Examples would be "you changed this unit test, but didn't update the unit test name", "you changed this function but not the doc string", or "if you reorder these if statements you can avoid deep nesting". Nothing groundbreaking, but nice things.

We still review like we did before, but can often focus a little more on the "what" instead of the "how".

In this application, the LLM is kind of like a linter with fuzzy rules. We didn't stop reviewing code just because many languages come with standard formatters nowadays, either.

While the whole code generation aspect of AI is all the rage right now (and to quote the article):

> Focus on tangible changes in areas that you care about that really do seem connected to AI

[20k]

So while I don't disagree with you at all, in terms of AI being a bubble, none of that is why the tech is being so hyped up. The current speculative hype push is being driven by two factors:

1. The promise that AI will replace most if not all developers

2. Alternatively, that AI will turn every developer into a 10-100x developer

My personal opinion is that it'll end up being one of many tools that's situationally useful, eg you're 100% right in that having it as an additional code review step is a great idea. But the amount of money being pumped into the industry isn't enough to sustain mild use cases like that and that isn't why the tech is being pushed. The trillions of dollars being dumped into improving clang tidy isn't sustainable if that's the end use case

[giantrobot]

> 1. The promise that AI will replace most if not all developers 2. Alternatively, that AI will turn every developer into a 10-100x developer

The AI hype train is promising to deliver the 20 year old developer with 30 years of experience that a company can pay $10 an hour.