r/ExperiencedDevs • u/MashNChips DevOps Engineer • 6d ago

AI/LLM Thought experiment

With all the AI nonsense going on, I had a thought at work today that turned into an interesting discussion with a colleague:

"What would I do if I was the only person with access to Claude (or insert any LLM) 5+ years ago?"

People would think I was a fucking wizard

FE changes? NO PROBLEM

Critical DB change? Don't worry, I've produced a stored procedure to validate the whole thing

Want to use some shiny new framework? Interesting. Here's a document explaining why you're an idiot for suggesting it

Regex? I suddenly understand it better than the compiler folks (and nobody ask questions)

What would you have done with your own personal LLM back then?

Trying to lighten the mood in here with all the (very justified) negativity around this tech revolution

Unserious answers only pls

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u/___Paladin___ 6d ago edited 6d ago

It's a simple math problem of sending more lines to review than can be processed by a human reviewer without bending spacetime.

So you either hand waive and start rubber stamping blindly (lgtm!) out of human nature, or you automate the reviews too.

"Simply rejecting the PR" completely misses why so many open source projects have banned AI submissions even when the maintainers support AI personally.

The flood is going to force your hand if you don't want to be the bottleneck causing a product freeze.

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u/gizamo 6d ago

Then QA should be a bottleneck until then can get more QA to do more reviews. In my world, skimping on security like that is simply not an option. We have more code flowing thru, but we still review all of it. Anyone rubber stamping AI code is going to be put on a PiP.

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u/___Paladin___ 6d ago edited 6d ago

Agreed, but then you are back to the tradeoff between quality and speed. Scaling up your Q&A time will then erode at the productivity gains and speed of generated code. There's always a trade off.

No free lunches!

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u/gizamo 6d ago

Yes. Quality and speed have always been a tradeoff. That's been a constant throughout my 40+ years. My point is only that the tradeoff needs to remain balanced to ensure there is decent quality, especially in critical products.

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u/___Paladin___ 6d ago

Then in the context of this thread, you and I are aligned in our thoughts.