Which of course they are going to try to brush it all away. Better than admitting that this problem very much still exists and isn’t going away anytime soon.
Don't get me wrong, I use AI every day, but it's mostly as a localized code complete or to help me debug tricky issues. Meaning I've written and understand the code myself, and the AI is there to augment my abilities. AI works great if it's used as a deductive tool.
Where it runs into issues is when it's used inductively, to create things that aren't there. When it does this, I feel the hallucinations can be off the charts -- inventing APIs, function names, entire libraries, and even entire programming languages on occasion. The AI is more than happy to deliver any kind of information you want, no matter how wrong it is.
AI is not a tool, it's a tiny Kafkaesque bureaucracy inside of your codebase. Does it work today? Yes! Why does it work? Who can say! Will it work tomorrow? Fingers crossed!
I use AI for rather complex tasks. It's impressive. It can make a bunch of non-trivial changes to several files, and have the code compile without warnings. But I need to iterate a few times so that the code looks like what I want.
That being said, I also lose time pretty regularly. There's a learning curve, and the tool would be much more useful if it was faster. It takes a few minutes to make changes, and there may be several iterations.
This is just an incredible statement. I can't think of another development tool we'd say this about. I'm not saying you're wrong, or that it's wrong to have tools we can't just, just... wow... what a sea change.
Because no other dev tool actually generates unique code like AI does. So you treat it like the other components of your team that generates code, the other developers. Do you trust other developers to write good code without mistakes without getting it reviewed by others. Of course not.
And then you say "by the time the rest of the team reviews it. Most code review is uneventful."
So you trust your team to develop without the need for code review but yet, your team does code review.
So what is the purpose of these code reviews? Is it the case that you actually don't think they are necessary, but perhaps management insists on them? You actually answer this question yourself:
> Most code review is uneventful.
Keyword here is "most" as opposed to "all" So based your team's applied practices and your own words, code review is for the purpose of catching mistakes and other needed corrections.
But it seems to me if you trust your team not to make mistakes, code review is superfluous.
As an aside, it seems your team culture doesn't make room for juniors because if your team had juniors I think it would be even more foolish to trust them not to make mistakes. Maybe a junior free culture works for your company, but that's not the case for every company.
My main point is code review is not superfluous no matter the skill level; junior, senior, or AI simply because everyone and every AI makes mistakes. So I don't trust those three classes of code emitters to not ever make mistakes or bad choices (i.e. be perfect) and therefore I think code review is useful.
Have some honesty and humility and you'll amazed at what's possible.
The purpose of the review is to find and fix occasional small details before it goes to physical testing. It does not involve constant babysitting of the developer. It's a little silly to bring up honesty when you spent that entire comment dancing around the reality that AI makes an inordinately large number of mistakes. I will pick the domain expert who refuses to touch AI over a generic programmer with access to it ten times out of ten.
The entire team as it is now (me included) were juniors. It's a traditional engineering environment in a location where people don't aggressively move between jobs at the drop of a hat. You don't need to constantly train younger developers when you can retain people.
> I "trust other developers to write good code without mistakes without getting it reviewed by others". Of course I can trust them to do the right thing even when nobody's looking, and review it anyway in the off-chance they overlooked something.
You're saying yes, I trust other developers to not make mistakes, but I'll check anyways in case they do. If you really trusted them not to make mistakes, you wouldn't need to check. They (eventually) will. How can I assert that? Because everyone makes mistakes.
It's absurd to expect anyone to not make mistakes. Engineers build whole processes to account for the fact that people, even very smart people make mistakes.
And it's not even just about mistakes. Often times, other developers have more context, insight or are just plain better and can offer suggestions to improve the code during review. So that's about teamwork and working together to make the code better.
I fully admit AI makes mistakes, sometimes a lot of them. So it needs code review . And on the other hand, sometimes AI can really be good at enhancing productivity especially in areas of repetitive drudgery so the developer can focus on higher level tasks that require more creativity and wisdom like architectural decisions.
> I will pick the domain expert who refuses to touch AI over a generic programmer with access to it ten times out of ten.
I would too, but I won't trust them not to make mistakes or occasional bad decisions because again, everybody does.
> You don't need to constantly train younger developers when you can retain people.
But you do need to train them initially. Or do you just trust them to write good code without mistakes too?