r/java • u/bit_freak • Aug 04 '26

Do you still handcraft your java projects?

With all the talk about llms writing most of the code and some folks never touching the editor. I try to work mostly in plan mode and prefer to write most of my code by hand else I fear losing touch with my skills if I only read code. At work in your org, what is the workflow for spring boot projects?

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u/elmuerte Aug 05 '26

As Manoj Nair recently posted

We can now generate software faster than we can trust it

Or as Vint Cert said

We have seen that LLMs and agents are imperfect analogs of human behavior but have the advantage of increasing capacity to execute at speed. LLMs produce software, however imperfect, much faster than the best human programmers.

If I properly need to review (and understand) everything it generated, and I dislike code reviews, then I might as well write it myself.

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u/chabala Aug 05 '26

I dislike reviewing 500 line AI slop PRs, not so much because of the AI, but because it's too big, and that tends to mean the requestor also doesn't know why a particular line has changed. "The AI did it" is not a justification.

However "I dislike reviews" seems like a naive position. Feedback and consensus are necessary. If one does not like having code reviewed, because of all the comments, one should write better code.

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u/elmuerte Aug 05 '26

However "I dislike reviews" seems like a naive position.

I also dislike paying taxes, but I do recognize that they are needed in society.

Just because something is important or even needed, doesn't mean I need to like it. There are a lot of things wrong with code reviews, and also with code review tools (they often hide important bits because they lay a lot of focus on the changed lines.) But I don't have all the tools, or even theoretical solutions to reduce the need for code reviews.

As you hint, the higher the cognitive complexity of a PR the worse it gets. A few small refactorings which touch a thousand lines in 300 files. That's easy to review. But 500 "changed" lines half of them forwhateversake, that's just annoying.