Reviewing code another person wrote also takes longer than code I wrote. Hell reviewing code I wrote six months ago might as well be someone else’s code.
My job right now depending on the week is to either lead large projects dealing with code I don’t write or smaller “full stack” POCs- design, cloud infrastructure (IAC), database, backend code and ETL jobs and rarely front end code. Even before LLMs if I had to look at a project I did it took me time to ramp up.
> Reviewing code another person wrote also takes longer than code I wrote.
Yes, and water is wet, but that's not exactly relevant. If you have an LLM generate slop at you that you have to review and adjust, you need to compare the time this whole process took you rather than just the "generating slop" step to the time needed to write the code by yourself.
It may still save you time, but it won't be anywhere close to 2 minutes anymore for anything but the most trivial stuff.
I have been developing a long time - 10 years as a hobbyist and 30 years professionally. For green field work especially since all of the code I write these days are around the AWS SDKs/CDKs, I find the code is just as structured as what I would write.
The only refactoring I ended up doing on my current project is extracting functions from a script and creating a library that I reused across other functionality.
Even then I just pasted the library into a new ChatGPT session and told it the requirements of my next piece of functionality and told it to use the library.
I don’t trust an LLM to write more than 200 lines of code at the time. But I hardly ever write more than 200-300 lines at a time.
I can tell you that my latest project has around 1000 lines of Node CDK code between multiple apps (https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/) and around 1000 lines of Python code and I didn’t write a single line of any of it by hand and from reviewing it, it didn’t make any choices that I wouldn’t make and I found some of the techniques it used for the CDK code were things I wouldn’t have thought about.
The SQL code it generated for one of the functions was based on my just giving it the inbound JSON and the create table statements and it didn’t idiomatic MySQL, with parameters (ie no sql injection risk) and no unsafe code.
This was a 3 week project that I would have at least needed one if not two junior/mid level devs to do without Gen AI. Since I also had to be in customer meetings, write documentation and help sells on another project coming up.
My job right now depending on the week is to either lead large projects dealing with code I don’t write or smaller “full stack” POCs- design, cloud infrastructure (IAC), database, backend code and ETL jobs and rarely front end code. Even before LLMs if I had to look at a project I did it took me time to ramp up.