every once in a while someone asks us "why can't you just review the slop code as if it were human written" and let me tell you that we have tried it, and you cannot, actually, do this, for the simple reasons that humans do not write code like that
human-written code follows a progression and exhibits a model of the problem domain. the model may be wrong, the progression may be wrong, but line 1 and line 10 are related to each other.
LLM code has none of that. it looks like code, but does not have the structure of it. there is no progression of thought, there is no model of the problem domain, and lines 1 and lines 10 bear no relationship to each other outside of statistical likelihood.
the question thus asks, "why can't you just eat the dogshit as if it were a burger cooked by a human"
@atax1a To add to that:
Unless someone is actively trying to mount a supply-chain attack, they are generally trying to make their code understandable. Comments and code both reflect what they are thinking. They may not quite reflect each other, but one allows you to build a mental model of intent that you can compare against the implementation.
In contrast, LLM-generated code is designed to be statistically probable. Each statement is the statement that is most likely to follow the previous one. Yet the reason for writing new code is that the requirements are different from all of the existing code in the world in some significant way. Reviewing statistically plausible code is very hard because it is code that is created specifically to look like the code you wanted. By coincidence, it sometimes is the code you wanted. But figuring that out requires working out exactly what code you wanted, at which point it’s less effort to just write it down than play a complex game of spot the difference.