this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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The place I work is actively developing an internal version of this. We already have optional AI PR reviews (they neither approve nor reject, just offer an opinion). As a reviewer, AI is the same as any other. It offers an opinion and you can judge for yourself whether its points need to be addressed or not. I'll be interested to see whether its comments affect the comments of the tech lead.
I've seen a preview of a system that detects problems like failing sonar analysis and it can offer a PR to fix it. I suppose for simple enough fixes like removing unused imports or unused code it might be fine. It gets static analysis and review like any other PR, so it's not going to be merging any defects without getting past a human reviewer.
I don't know how good any of this shit actually is. I tested the AI review once and it didn't have a lot to say because it was a really simple PR. It's a tool. When it does good, fine. When it doesn't, it probably won't take any more effort than any other bad input.
I'm sure you can always find horrific examples, but the question is how common they are and how subtle any introduced bugs are, to get past the developer and a human reviewer. Might depend more on time pressure than anything, like always.
The "AI agent" approach's goal doesn't include a human reviewer. As in the agent is independent, or is reviewed by other AI agents. Full automation.
They are selling those AI agents as working right now despite the obvious flaws.
They're also selling self-driving cars... the question is: when will the self driving cars kill fewer people per passenger-mile than average human drivers?
Right now they do between a combination of extra oversight, generally travelling at slow speeds, and being resticted in area. Kind of like how children are less likely to die in a swimming pool with lifeguards compared to rivers and beaches without lifeguards.
Once they are released into the wild I expect a number of high profile deaths, but also assume that those fatalities will be significantly lower than the human average due to being set to be overly cautious. I do expect them to have a high rate of low speed collisions when they encounter confusing or absent road markings in rural areas.
Not self driving but "driver assist" on a rental we had recently would see skid marks on the road and swerve to follow them - every single time. That's going to be a difference between the automated systems and human drivers - humans do some horrifically negligent and terrible things, but... most humans tend not to repeat the same mistake too many times.
With "the algorithm" controlling thousands or millions of vehicles, when somebody finds a hack that causes one to crash, they've got a hack that will cause all similar ones to crash. I doubt we're anywhere near "safe" learn from their mistakes self-recoding on these systems yet, that has the potential for even worse and less predictable outcomes.
There's more to it than that, there's also the cost of implementation.
If a self-driving car killed on average one less human than your average human does, but costs $100,000 to install in the car, then it still isn't worth implementing.
Yes I know that puts a price on human life but that is how economics works.
$100K for a safer driver might be well worth it to a lot of people, particularly if it's a one-time charge. If that $100K autopilot can serve for seven years, that's way cheaper than paying a chauffeur.