[crimsonnoodle58]

I've thought about implementing the same at our company. Something that iterates through all our tickets, one shots them and creates PRs.

But humans are still left to review the code in the end, and as a developer, code reviewing is one of my least favourite things..

I'm not sure I could spend the rest of my career just reviewing code, and never writing it. And I'm not sure my team would either. They would go insane.

As developers, by nature, we are creative. We like to solve problems. Thats why we do what we do each day. We get a thrill when we solve the problem, test it and it actually works. When we see it in production and users enjoying it. When we see the CPU usage go from 99% to 5%.

I fear we are soon becoming nothing more than the last validation step between AI and reality. And once AI becomes reality, which is very soon, the days of development as we knew it will be over.

[throwatdem12311]

One thing I don’t see developers talking about much is that if your job is to only read code instead of writing it, how do you expect to stay good at reviewing code if you never write it?

I only speak for me but when I review code I need to dig into my own experience writing and and remember what works and what doesn’t that I’ve internalized over years of writing and manually debugging code. Take that out of the equation and I wouldn’t be good at reviewing code for long.

I used to write a lot of C++ back in the day, and I can still read it and understand it for the most part but I would never be able to effectively review anything non-trivial. I just don’t have enough recent experience writing it myself to have internalized all of the obscure pitfalls and gotchas. And just vommitting out some C++ from a bot and just having it redo things until it has the appearance of working correctly isn’t gonna help me with that.

“My job now is just reviewing code” is such an extremey short-sighted view I’m terrified for the future where nobody understands anything anymore. I’m sure OpenAI and Anthropic would love this though.

And yeah, reviewing code is one of the more tedious and unfun parts of the job why would I want this?

One of the most annoying parts of my job is my supervisor who used to be a dev but became a manager years ago. He doesn’t really understand the codebase enough anymore and I spend so much explaining basic things to him now it actually hinders our productivity when he wants to “contribute”. And let me just say that getting a Claude sub for the whole team hasn’t helped this at all.

And one last thing - every single engineer I know that needs to maintain a Stripe integration hates them with the power of a million suns.

[ebhn]

Totally agree with this. When I review code I don't build a strong mental model of the system, and I think you can only really do that by solving the problems that arise during the creation of the system yourself. I'm optimistic the pendulum will swing away from the "hand off a spec to an agent(s)" and back towards engineers being engaged and directing LLMs to implement/optimize smaller, more specific pieces of code, with most of the direction being determined by the user

[ffsm8]

Fwiw, reviews are usually boring because most code you review solves boring problems.

Otherwise wouldn't you first figure out how you'd solve the issue, then contrast it to what the PR creator actually did - and then judge which approach is better, long term?

At least that's how I do it whenever there is an actual fun problem, but they're admittedly rare... It's mostly just boring adjustments and these are as interesting to explore as ... Lacing my shoes.

[nojito]

>how do you expect to stay good at reviewing code if you never write it?

What exactly does "writing code" mean?

Are you telling me I have to write for loops and if elses forever?

[devonkelley]

The real issue with "just reviewing code" is that code review skill degrades when you stop writing. I've watched it happen. The people who are best at catching subtle bugs are the ones writing code daily. Pull them into pure review mode for 6 months and they start missing things, not because they got dumber, but because the pattern recognition atrophies without the feedback loop of writing, running, and debugging yourself.

[caseyohara]

I reckon the developers most excited about AI & agents never got the same thrill or satisfaction that you do. Those developers are plainly motivated by different things, and that’s okay.

[therealdrag0]

I wouldn’t say never. I spent the first 10 years of my career loving crafting code. Then I moved up in seniority and naturally my focus and prioritization had to shift. Even before AI I didn’t code that much, focusing more on design, planning, reviewing, firefighting, and team leadership (still an IC).

One exciting thing about AI is when I have an idea of something to do and can visualize it, instead of writing a ticket that sits in the backlog, I can use AI to vibe it up, with just a couple hours of my attention I can spare. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t. But it’s fun and satisfying to get more shit done, and be able to scratch the same builder and solver itches in my 10% time.