by avikalp on 3/1/25, 2:20 PM with 33 comments
by Legend2440 on 3/1/25, 6:54 PM
by Herring on 3/1/25, 6:56 PM
It just talks like it's very smart, and humans apparently have a bias for persuasive communication skills. It's also very fast, which humans also think indicates general intelligence. But it's not, and that's why most LLM tools are author-focused, so that a human expert can catch errors.
The way you know fully autonomous driving is nowhere near ready is by noticing we don't even trust robots to do fully autonomous cooking and cleaning. Similarly, let's see it understand and refactor a massive codebase first.
by lukaslalinsky on 3/1/25, 6:22 PM
As a sole developer of a non-trivial open source project, I've recently started using CodeRabbit, very skeptical about it, but right on the first PR, it actually found a bug that my CI tests did not catch, decided to keep it after that.
Gemini Code Assist on the other hand, the first suggestion it did would actually lead to a bug, so that was out immediately.
by CompoundEyes on 3/1/25, 8:04 PM
by mschild on 3/1/25, 6:26 PM
> most AI code review tools on the market today are fundamentally author-focused, not reviewer-focused.
This pretty much describes our experience. Our engineers create a PR and now wait for the review bot to provide feedback. The author will any fix any actual issues the bot brings up and only then will they publish the PR to the rest of the team.
From our experience there are 4 things that make the bot valuable:
1. Any general logical issues in the code are caught with relative certainty (not evaluating a variable value properly or missing a potential edge case, etc).
2. Some of the comments the bot leaves are about the business logic in code and asking about it and having the author provide a clearer explanation helps reviewers to understand what's going on as well if it wasn't clear enough from the code itself.
3. We provide a frontend platform to other engineers in the company that our operations teams interact with. The engineers rarely implement more than 1-2 features a year. We gave the bot a list of coding and frontend guidelines that we enforce (capitalisation rules, title formatting, component spacing, etc) and it will remind reviewers about these requirements.
4. We told it to randomly change it's way of talking from Yoda to Dr Seuss and some of the comments, while correct on a technical level, are absolutely hilarious and can give you a short giggle in an otherwise stressful day.
by savanaly on 3/1/25, 6:24 PM
The commentary given above is invalid if due to the preferences of the human developers or just weird protocol in their working relationship they end up with different AI's in the two instances. But I think in the long term equilibrium this point applies.
by shermantanktop on 3/1/25, 7:56 PM