They can lull the human reviewer into a false sense of security.

"Computer already looked at it so I only need to glance at it"

I don’t know what your process is but if someone else has reviewed a PR before I take my turn I don’t ignore the code they’ve looked at. In fact I take the time to review both the original code as well as their comments or suggestions. That’s the point of review after all, to verify the thinking behind the code as well as the code itself and that applies equally to thoughts or code added by a reviewer.

> LLM [...] feels extremely well suited for catching “stupid mistakes”.

No.

Linters are extremely well suited for catching stupid mistakes.

LLMs are extremely well suited for the appearance of catching stupid mistakes.

Linters will catch things like this because they can go through checking and evaluating things logically:

> if (

> isValid(primaryValue, "strict") || isValid(secondaryValue, "strict") ||

> isValid(primaryValue, "loose" || isValid(secondaryValue, "loose"))

> //...............................^^^^ Did we forget a closing ')'?

> ) {

> ...

> }

LLMs will only highlight exact problems they've seen before, miss other problems that linters would immediately find, and hallucinate new problems altogether.

Linters are great at finding syntactical errors like the case you mentioned. But LLMs do a better job at finding logical flaws or enforcing things like non-syntactic naming conventions. The idea is not to replace linters, but to complement them. In fact, one of the flows we're building next is fixing linting issues that linters struggle to fix automatically.

While true in a subset of problems, linters will also miss stupid mistakes because not everything is syntactical.

AI for example can catch the fact that `phone.match(/\d{10}/)` might break because of spaces, while a linter has no concept of a correct "regex" as long as it matches the regex syntax.

I don't think anyone is arguing that replacing linters with AI is the answer, instead a combination of both is useful.