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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • For me, the same rules apply, but as you say or hint, SQL as a language is different from higher, “structured” programming languages.

    Adding comments on subqueries, applies, conditions, doing deliberate line breaks or oneliners, procedure comments and documentation where they make sense - most of the same things apply and are applicable. Structuring and commenting works quite well, until it doesn’t for performance and readability reasons where you don’t want to introduce additional procedures or functions or separate other aspects.

    In those cases, it is what it is. Often comments can live on the lines where the aspect is.

    I also like to use block comments with open and closing block indication like

    -- \ Table or aspect something stuff \
    […]
    -- / Table or aspect something stuff /
    

    The language doesn’t provide the structure for it, but I can still implement that structure through text comments alone.




  • My colleague who didn’t ask nor describe his changes now generates descriptions and code comments through AI and it doesn’t improve anything. It’s verbose, imprecise, confusing, and irritating.

    I wonder if and how much communication reduced with my other colleagues. I guess probably a bit where they now ask AI (first). But not significantly, in my team, luckily. We still regularly talk. But maybe it’s on a path of reduction right now. I would find it sad and bad as well.


  • It really is a very visible demonstration of human faultiness.

    A reasonable engineering approach would have been an interesting new technology with open discussion and assessment and expansion of exploration. Instead, we get hype cycles and hyperbole claims and lies primarily driven and publicized and repeated as market marketing and investor marketing and an industry driven by money and investment rather than technology and reasonably explorative and increasing usage.

    It’s sad and tragic. But not surprising. It’s a consequence of human psyche, social constructs and market and society system structure.

    When I hear my colleague does a presentation differently for internal towards developers with more reasonable AI takes and a different one for external which basically practically joins the AI hype instead of voicing boundaries, it’s pretty sad that it can’t be honest communication throughout and be understood as such.

    I don’t see it as an isolated fault of “corporate leadership” as in of development factories/teams. It’s a broad issue, from the AI companies, press hype, industry hype, to then corporate and broader industry leadership eating it up and implementing and expecting marketing and hype claims.





  • I hope my drive-by PRs don’t come off in the same way.

    For example, as the simplest no-description, no-comment example, when I see typos or wording errors in text on a random blog I check if there’s a direct way to contribute - to GitHub edit and submit a PR, and when there is, I do that.

    There’s nothing for me to say or describe, really, and it’s not like I interacted with their project or community before or even plan to after. (Sometimes I do look into the issue tracker etc depending on the project or website. But that’s beside the raised concern.)

    I see it more of a collective and open collaboration. But that’s not necessarily visible on the receiving end.
















  • So my main point is to stop asking whether and how code review in its current form can be saved, but to have an open conversation about what we are trying to achieve here and the costs and benefits of alternative models.

    What would these other models be? The article assumes LLM-generated code leads to the loss of current review processes, which they call ‘modern reviews’.

    I feel like my team does and will continue to do reviews for the same reasons and with the same gains as before. LLM may generate code, but I expect my colleagues to take ownership of whatever they produce, to understand it, take responsibility, and describe it. (Which is an issue/gap for some, but that was an issue even before generating code.)