Brilliant, thank you

Well said. It also causes a lot of bitterness among engineers too, not being able to follow the red string is maddening to some. This rage can prevent them from finding good prompting strategies also which would directly ease a lot of the pain, in a similar way to how it’s far harder to teach my mother how to do something on her phone if she’s already frustrated with it.

No, you don’t. This is a fundamental principle of cryptography, unless you’ve got a hidden proof of p=np up your sleeve.

Well said, you’re absolutely right. In practice code review is orders of magnitude faster than code creation and it always has been, baffling anyone is arguing otherwise. Perhaps they’ve never worked in a real organisation, or they’ve only worked on safety critical code,m or something?

Sometimes code review is so fast it's literally instant (because people aren't actually reading the code).

I think it's one of those sort of, dunno, wink wink situations where we all know that doing real in depth code reviews would take way more time than the managers will give (and generally isn't worth it anyways) so we just scan for obvious things and whatever happens to interact with our particular speciality in the code base.

Outside of life saving critical software or military spec software, no one needs to review so hard they understand it to the level you’re describing, and they do not.

There is a mathematical principle that verification of a proof is easier than any proof. The same is true in code.

I mean, it's even easier to just not read the code in the first place, I'm not sure what that proves, other than perhaps an implicit collorary to the original quote "reading code is quite hard (so people rarely bother)"

Well said. Much like the self driving debate we don’t need them to be perfect, just better than us to be useful, and clearly they already are for the most part.

I dunno about the need for disclosure in this way. In my working life I’ve copied a lot of code from stack overflow, or a forum or something when I’ve been stuck. I’ve understood it (or at least tried to) when implementing it, but I didn’t technically write it. It was never a problem though because everybody did this to some degree and no one would demand others disclose such a thing at least in hobby projects or low stakes professional work (obviously it’s different if you’re making like, autopilot software for a passenger plane or something mission critical, that’s notwithstanding).

If it’s the norm to use LLMs, which I honestly believe is the case now or at least very soon, why disclose the obvious? I’d do it the other way around, if you made it by hand disclose that it was entirely handmade, without any AI or stackoverflow or anything, and we can treat it with respect and ooh and ahh accordingly. But otherwise it’s totally reasonable to assume LLM usage, at the end of the day the developer is still responsible for the final result, how it functions, just like a company is responsible for its products even if they contracted out the development of them. Or how a filmmaker is responsible for how a scene looks even if they used abobe after effects to content aware remove an object.

I disclosed AI because I think it's important to disclose it. I also take pride in the process. Mind you, I also cite Stack Overflow answers in my code if I use it. Usually with a comment like:

    // Source: https://stackoverflow.com/q/11828270

With any AI code I use, I adopted this style (at least for now):

    // Note: This was generated by Claude 4.5 Sonnet (AI).
    // Prompt: Do something real cool.

Genuinely curious, what’s your goal here? Disparage those who use LLMs? Or just express your unhappiness at the amount of ai content on the HN front page? Or just want to throw shade on LLM use in general?

This is impressive and cool but I don’t understand the bitterness here.

sarcasm. In response of HN being mostly about AI now.

I’m very interested in the AI content, but it’s also a bit sad how much it became the main topic.

I've only been here 8 years but it seems like there has always been such a topic sucking the air from the room at any given era.

This inevitably results in even the completely unrelated topics constantly becoming a reference to that conversation.

That has it's own wake of someone discussing how it's brought into every conversation by those that either love/hate - further making it suck even more air out of the room.

At this point the ink catches up with itself while folks such as folks like Danny Spencer occasionally deliver us the quick doomscrolling hit we were all really here for.

Just admit that you don't understand sarcasm.

? I'm not any of the previous people talking about why you night have commented. I'm talking to your above note about bringing sarcastic comments about AI into this post not previously about AI. That said, sure - I'm probably not the best sarcasm detector myself anyhow :).

I.e. AI is such the main topic here that we still have some type of comment (sarcastic or not) bringing it up in the few posts unrelated to it. It's truly sadly inescapable on more than one level, as will be whatever the next hot topic is in a few years.

Sorry

Hey no worries, sorry I was unclear! Have a good one.

Aww man you were doing so well

Ah, so number 2. Thanks for answering!

You mean you tell someone else to make a painting while you watch and then claim their work as yours

I suspect this is like the invention of the car. Some people just love riding horses, so they’ll keep doing it as a hobby. The rest of us are fine with a car.