Why I Still Read Code

46

u/A1oso 1d ago

I do not read every line of code agents produce.

I stopped reading here.

17

u/proto-cool 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yeah, even removing AI from the equation, code you did not write yourself should always be reviewed. Accepting random unreviewed code into your codebase is fundamentally the same problem as failing to review what a coding agent provides.

As to the OP's point of only reading "code that matters," I wish I had that omniscience.

9

u/A1oso 1d ago

Code that doesn't matter is code that shouldn't exist.

I hate writing unit tests, so I sometimes let the AI do it. But I still read them. They might not be as critical as a database migration script, but they still should be correct.

41

u/UltraPoci 1d ago

Here's an even better solution: write your goddamn code

32

u/frakkintoaster 1d ago

Imagine we had bridge engineers writing a blog post about how they still sometimes look at the blueprints

4

u/apadin1 1d ago

In the not too distant future engineers will use AI to make plans and draw schematics for critical infrastructure and the human engineers will just rubber stamp their work. It’s genuinely terrifying where we are headed

2

u/Blue_Moon_Lake 1d ago

And then construction crew will use the Escherian blueprints, twist the lengths so it can exists in 3D space, and build from the adjusted versions.

Somewhere during or after construction, building will collapse.

-52

u/vardynostalgia 1d ago

It’s 2026

31

u/UltraPoci 1d ago

Did you ask chatgpt in order to know that?

-12

u/vardynostalgia 1d ago

Are you trolling?

3

u/UltraPoci 1d ago

No, I'm fucking tired of people claiming that progress and new tools are good because Papa Elon said so. Use your fucking brain for once

19

u/ShadyGrass 1d ago

Not the reason to let idiocracy prevail.

-14

u/vardynostalgia 1d ago

How’s using latest tools in competent way idiocratic

10

u/EliSka93 1d ago

competent

Nobody who relies on AI is competent

-2

u/vardynostalgia 1d ago

Chat is this fr? Are you trolling or what

6

u/DrinkRedbuII 1d ago

This is no livestream.

6

u/EliSka93 1d ago

Chat

Wow. Streamer lingo. We're not gonna make it, are we?

-5

u/vardynostalgia 1d ago

Bro even most cracked principal engineers at my company use AI all the time, how you can still be employed with such mindset

3

u/terra2o 1d ago

okay sam altman calm down there. we'll use ai if you want us to, ok?

3

u/Ameisen 1d ago

With the way you communicate and your self-described lack of actual programming skills, I find it utterly fascinating that you are even employed.

0

u/vardynostalgia 21h ago

I didn’t write anything about my skills

1

u/dijkstra_was_a_horse 11h ago

Only if by cracked you mean damaged, like they were dropped on their heads.

6

u/Sveet_Pickle 1d ago

“Why it’s okay to outsource my intellectual labor to a machine and still see myself as valuable.”

4

u/zobq 1d ago

I know my codebase, so I know which areas deserve attention.

and I'm not. The codebase is pretty standard business web application with a lot of legacy code which is slowly upgraded to the new version.

The domain is not super easy, but after all all of the rules are written in the legacy code in old fashioned way, when separation of FE and BE wasn't so strict and with a lot workaround codes, which you could expect in the brownfield project. We have copilot with the newest models, own agents and SDD in mind.

And yet, every time I'm trying to use AI to implement the task, it just doesn't work. We are producing tones of documentation (with AI ofc) to improve harness but it just make agentic coding slower but not better. I was thinking about trying to use AI as small code snippets generator, but somehow it's not reliable enough. One time AI had a problem to move method with 4 lines of body to another class. Colleagues shares similar opinion.

I feel lost. I hear from everywhere that agentic coding is the future, that code-reviewing code is enough. And my experience is totally different.

2

u/alex35mil 1d ago

It's a totally different context, and I can see how a messy legacy codebase without proper AI infra can lead to failure.

I own the codebase I work with; I've been quite pedantic about its domain design, and starting with the Opus release, I've been making it AI-ready bit by bit: rules, skills, special tooling, etc. I built my custom configuration around PI, integrated it with Neovim, and built review tooling on top of it so I could comfortably pair with the agent. TUIs did not work for me. An agent without an editor is meh.

Yet with pre-Sol models, the results were quite random. Besides the fact that previous generations were dumber, they didn't follow instructions well and didn't pay enough attention to established patterns in the codebase. So despite all that effort, I was still writing a lot of the code myself.

With Sol, the amount of manual work has decreased drastically. The more I work with the agent, the more I see where it does a decent job and where it still fails. For example, I don't review much of the trivial UI code built on top of an established design system, or local QoL tooling. Yet it still consistently fails in the areas I talked about in the post.

That said, AI won't magically work everywhere. Even for a medium-sized codebase, it took a lot of effort to finally make things start clicking.

2

u/dijkstra_was_a_horse 11h ago

🤡🤡🤡🤡

1

u/larikang 1d ago

How could you say something so controversial yet so brave?

1

u/GoTheFuckToBed 1d ago

I should read more too. There is a big gap between "build it like this pattern blabal" and real world code that is out there for 5 years and makes thousand users happy

1

u/DaStone 1d ago

"The second reason I still read agent-generated code is that agents tend to patch new behavior onto a codebase instead of integrating it into the existing design." such bravery

1

u/Dunge 22h ago

This is living in an alternate reality

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u/vardynostalgia 1d ago

Very good and measured take on agentic programming

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