> More worryingly, something I don't see discussed enough is "review fatigue". It's far more fatiguing reviewing the output of an LLM than writing the code yourself a lot of the times. Early on in your career, this might lead to the tendency to just say "eh, looks alright enough".
I am definitely worried about that. I got into a mode of doing morning code review every morning due to having a bunch of active open source repos, so over time as they grow in activity I learned to adapt my schedule, mind set, and everything around how to do the right amount of code review (when to finish the PR yourself, when to give pointers to train a new contributor, when it's not worth your time yet to say more than "tests fail", etc.). I started for years pulling every piece of code locally, running it, figuring out why someone would make a change like that, etc. and then it took like 5 years before I could actually start to do code review well just by reading a git diff. I needed to know the domain, the language, the problem space, and how people tend to work, all well enough to make that simple enough to have a mental model.
Then, I tend to see some junior programmers put up LLM stuff and I go "oh just handle the extra memory allocations and it's good to go" and they go "wait handle what where?". If you can't eyeball that in under a minute of scrolling through the code... then you shouldn't be doing code review by scrolling through it yet. But if they keep doing it like this, they will never build that skill.
That's why I think the right LLM usage is really for those who have already built that code review skill. It's not to gate the usage of LLMs, but people will never learn if they aren't strongly engaging with the code at some level.
I am definitely worried about that. I got into a mode of doing morning code review every morning due to having a bunch of active open source repos, so over time as they grow in activity I learned to adapt my schedule, mind set, and everything around how to do the right amount of code review (when to finish the PR yourself, when to give pointers to train a new contributor, when it's not worth your time yet to say more than "tests fail", etc.). I started for years pulling every piece of code locally, running it, figuring out why someone would make a change like that, etc. and then it took like 5 years before I could actually start to do code review well just by reading a git diff. I needed to know the domain, the language, the problem space, and how people tend to work, all well enough to make that simple enough to have a mental model.
Then, I tend to see some junior programmers put up LLM stuff and I go "oh just handle the extra memory allocations and it's good to go" and they go "wait handle what where?". If you can't eyeball that in under a minute of scrolling through the code... then you shouldn't be doing code review by scrolling through it yet. But if they keep doing it like this, they will never build that skill.
That's why I think the right LLM usage is really for those who have already built that code review skill. It's not to gate the usage of LLMs, but people will never learn if they aren't strongly engaging with the code at some level.