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0 pointsmrguyorama11mo ago0 comments

Understanding code takes more effort than writing it, somehow. That's always been a huge problem in the industry, because code you wrote five years ago was written by someone else, but AI coding takes that from "all code in your org except the code you wrote in the past couple years" to "all code was written by someone else".

How well does your team work when you can't even answer a simple question about your system because nobody wrote, tested, played with the code in question?

How do you answer "Is it possible for our system to support split payments?" when not a single member of your team has even worked on the billing code?

No, code reviews do not familiarize an average dev to the level of understanding the code in question.

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Mofpofjis11mo ago

> Understanding code takes more effort than writing it

yes!

> somehow

not difficult to explain. Coding is a creative activity where you work top-down; you decompose the abstract/high-level into the detailed/low-level. You dictate the "events" happening to the code, you are in control. Reviewing is reactive; the code you review dictates what happens in your brain (you are under control, not in control), and you need to work bottom-up: you try to re-compose the whole from the fragments. Even for human coders, a detailed commit message is a pre-requisite before their code can undergo review. The reviewer is in the worse position, so he needs to be supported as much as possible.