To all the engineers using claude code: how do you submit your (well, claude’s) to review? Say, you have a big feature/epic to implement. Typically (pre-ai) times you would split it in chunks and submit each chunk as PR to be reviewed. You don’t want to submit dozens of file changes because nobody would review it. Now with llms, one can easily explain the whole feature to the machine and they would output the whole code just fine. What do you do? You divide it manually for review submission? One chunk after another?
It’s way easier to let the agent code the whole thing if your
prompt is good enough than to give instructions bit by bit only because your colleagues cannot review a PR with 50 file changes.
Practically - you can commit it all after you're done and then tell it to tease apart the commit into multiple well documented logical steps.
"Ask the LLM" is a good enough solution to an absurd number of situations. Being open to questioning your approach - or even asking the LLM (with the right context) to question your approach has been valuable in my experience.
But from a more general POV, its something we'll have to spend the next decade figuring out. 'Agile'/scrum & friends is a sort of industry-wide standard approach, and all of that should be rethought - once a bit of the dust settles.
We're so early in the change that I haven't even seen anybody get it wrong, let alone right.
The split seems artificial now. Before, an average engineer would produce code sequentially, chunk after chunk. Each chunk submitted only after the previous one was reviewed and approved.
Today, one could submit the whole thing for review. Also, if machines can write it, why not let machines review it too? Seems weird not to do so.
Not sure I follow. The limitation has never been about the developer being able to write a complex feature in one MR. It has always been about the other developer not being able to review a complex MR.
So far, nothing I've seen convinces me that machines can (yet) write or review code autonomously (although they can certainly be useful as assistants). Maybe some day.
It’s way easier to let the agent code the whole thing if your prompt is good enough than to give instructions bit by bit only because your colleagues cannot review a PR with 50 file changes.