AI code review is nice to have an additional pair of eyes but it doesn't substitute to the maintainer eyes. A big part of a review is deciding if you want that change merged in. Not because of the immediate code but what it means to the project to bring this in.

AI code review, to my eyes, just reduce the number of bugs, they do not shorten the review time. Otherwise, it means you are compromising on the direction of the project.

I meant AI to judge whether a PR is trash or not for ban purposes. Not AI to do the thorough code review itself.

In that case yes I think that can be of real value.

I help maintain a big project as well and I can totally relates what the author is describing.

The amount of security advisories and PRs opened is getting out of hands. This is no longer just spell check PRs that you can merge in less than 1 minute of review. Often that's going to be supposed perf improvement, attempts at fixing things that are not broken, or submitting completely new features.

These relatively low effort PRs takes a lot of effort to review or even just to filter out.

How could it take less effort to maintain a fork? You have to merge the upstream in every week and fight endlessly on conflicts with your patches.

Having seen this happening in the past, pre-AI, the answer is usually that they don't. They just stay on that version forever. Or it's maintained until the original author moves on, after which it's someone else's problem to figure out how to move back to the upstream, which has now had years of changes.

Originally, yes. Nowadays, it's trivial. Agents can handle this flawlessly.

There can be a point of divergence when even humans can't merge things anymore, so I highly doubt that experience is universal.

No you can't say that! It's the superintelligence. You will be left behind.

If it's super intelligent... Won't I be left behind anyway?!?

I never had so little free time as I have these days. Most of my time is spent at work or with my lovely family.Love my family, and work is great.

The thing is that, probably like many of you, I love going deep in a side project, even if it lands nowhere. With so little time, working on them has become a very frustrating activity.

This is where I found my trap... do more with very little time by delegating to an LLM. You get dopamine shots, the feeling of achieving something but the cognitive dept is just crazy. So much that the activity becomes almost meaning less. After couple of months doing this, I'm not even sure it's a good use of this time. I get very little satisfaction on the long run.

I don't have a solution to this problem, not even sure there one. I think I have to accept that this is an activity that takes time, and only time gives the real gratification.

This is a very good analogy. You have to do way more effort to make sure it's correct than if you have asked it yourself with a controlled context. I generally don't want to feel lucky when I ask questions to coworkers.