[vrighter]

Code is much much harder to check for errors than an email.

Consider, for example, the following python code:

    x = (5)

vs

    x = (5,)

One is a literal 5, and the other is a single element tuple containing the number 5. But more importantly, both are valid code.

Now imagine trying to spot that one missing comma among the 20kloc of code one so proudly claims AI helped them "write", especially if it's in a cold path. You won't see it.

[lock1]

> Code is much much harder to check for errors than an email.

Disagree.

Even though performing checks on dynamic PLs is much harder than on static ones, PLs are designed to be non-ambiguous. There should be exactly 1 interpretation for any syntactically valid expression. Your example will unambiguously resolve to an error in a standard-conforming Python interpreter.

On the other hand, natural languages are not restricted by ambiguity. That's why something like Poe's law exists. There's simply no way to resolve the ambiguity by just staring at the words themselves, you need additional information to know the author's intent.

In other words, an "English interpreter" cannot exist. Remove the ambiguities, you get "interpreter" and you'll end up with non-ambiguous, Python-COBOL-like languages.

With that said, I agree with your point that blindly accepting 20kloc is certainly not a good idea.

[vrighter]

Tell me you've never written any python without telling me you've never written any python...

Those are both syntactically valid lines of code. (it's actually one of python's many warts). They are not ambiguous in any way. one is a number, the other is a tuple. They return something of a completely different type.

My example will unambiguously NOT give an error because they are standard conforming. Which you would have noticed had you actually took 5 seconds to try typing them in the repl.

[bartread]

In my experience the example you give here is exactly the kind of problem that AI powered code reviews are really good at spotting, and especially amongst codebases with tens of thousands of lines of code in them where a human being might well get scrolling blindness when quickly moving around them to work.

[vrighter]

The AI is the one which made the mistake in the first place. Why would you assume it's guaranteed to find it?

The few times I've tried giving LLMs a shot I've had them warning me of not putting some validations in, when that exact validation was exactly 1 line below where they stopped looking.

And even if it did pass an AI code review, that's meaningless anyway. It still needs to be reviewed by an actual human before putting it into production. And that person would still get scrolling blindness whether or not the ai "reviewer" actually detected the error or not.