It’s very jarring to see such a different reaction than my own to this post. Each time it comes up (was posted in a friend discord as well recently) I’m in awe and love the explanations.
Some folks don’t want others to be happy. I had someone in my life recently complain that someone they met was too happy and thus toxic and ignorant of the world’s atrocities.
Making changes to someone else’s PR (other than extremely trivial ones) feels like they don’t have much ownership. People often have a reason for doing things the way they did and skipping over them seems like a mistake.
We do architecture reviews now. Code reviews are going away because agents handle it.
When I ask an agent to do a code change for a PR, it’s because it’s not something I think the other engineer really should waste their time on. It’s on the same level as nitpicking what lines the braces go on before we had auto-formatters and lint checkers in CI.
Other staff engineers I rarely even see their code. I trust them to be able to review and deliver and support their own code and communicate breaking changes. Knowledge gets disseminated at weekly architecture reviews, in person.
Offshore developers under me have their code gone over with a fine-toothed comb. They don’t own the work. They don’t support it. They can’t even speak to me without using copy pasted Claude responses that are wrong half the time anyway. I have zero qualms with “going over them”.
> Code reviews are going away because agents handle it.
Agents don't "handle" code review. With no human in the loop, there is no difference between "generating" code and "reviewing" code. Let's not bastardize the word "review". The code is unreviewed. Now, whether that's a dealbreaker or not for your project or company is a different question.
Personally, I've found that unreviewed LLM code unnecessarily explodes in complexity and the credit / token cost per change increases in tandem as the LLM pulls more into its context window. This is especially the case when you let it go wild on test cases. We don't have an unlimited budget for AI, maybe you do, so this is a concern for us. So we've decided to continue to review code and ask LLMs to significantly reduce the complexity of their generated code - which is a task that we're finding they are extremely bad at.
They're probably extremely bad at reducing complexity because the incentive for frontier model providers might be to train models that are capable of one-shotting flappy bird, instead of models that are capable of maintaining mature code bases that already have an implementation of the ad-hoc parsing function it just generated, as well as the newly-generated 50 test cases for it.
Every additional level of abstraction in computers has resulted in bloat that makes software less efficient and more bloated. AI is merely continuing to accelerate the tread.
The real issue at hand is that humans need to decide to start resource constraining AI before it consumes the entire world.
> We do architecture reviews now. Code reviews are going away because agents handle it.
So you already failed the first part of doing your goddamn job as an engineer which is reviewing and owning code. Code review is a vital part of that, because code ownership is a responsibility shared by your entire team. We used to say that cowboy coders were a disaster for your team and now you're saying everyone on your team is effectively a cowboy coder.
If it turns out claude or whatever LLM you're using pulled in a bad package and now your companies data has been exfiltrated are you going to be the one willing to be fired for your blunder?
Jesus, this rant is so eerily similar to one I read 25 years ago when someone explained why they stopped using C and started using C++ that I wouldn't be surprised to find that you are the same one who was complaining back then.
> Code reviews are going away because agents handle it.
So you're producing slop that is going to blow up in your faces. That's your organization's right, but not everyone is interested in giving up on producing a quality product like you guys are.
When the company I work for was evaluating it, there were multiple rough points. Their terms and conditions allowed training on prompts, the default behavior was to route prompts to their servers for conversation summary/labeling. One of their lead maintainers is also super toxic on many issues.
Sorry this is all baseless with no links, I’m on my phone and locating those issues again isn’t something I have time for.
It’s a good tool I just don’t like the privacy policies nor maintainers attitudes.
1. The privacy policy was a bit misleading, but it has since been updated to reflect the exact state of things. [1]. For example, DeepSeek models have ZDR, although their ZDR contract is renewed monthly. It COULD change. You need to toggle a Setting in your account to use DS.
2. At one point (apparently) summary and title generations were handled by Grok. This has changed, by default it uses your 'small_model' configured in your config. By default, it will use a cheap model provided by your provider. E.g. if you have ChatGPT API connected, it will use the cheapest ChatGPT model. OpenRouter users MAY see it routed to a free model however. [2] [3]
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