(Human) Attention is all you need.
If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
191–200 of 551 posts
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#192A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…
why not just approve the PRs with little more than a cursory glance? One of two things will happen: 1. Things start breaking, proving AI generated code sucks and the individual spamming these PRs is incompetent. 2. The code works fine and reviews are unnecessary for anything other than liability concerns.
Because we're all on call for the service, and tragedy of the commons exists. That coworker isn't paying the cost, everyone else is paying a fraction of it, and it builds over time.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#193A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…
In big software teams, the bottleneck is team communication. I've run big and small teams. If I want to speed things up, I remove people from the team. Everything gets easier. This has worked amazingly well every time I've done this over the past decades. Removing people doesn't have to mean firing them necessarily. Splitting teams is a good reflex. But of course the people you remove from a team are typically not th…
> I'd question the added value of manual PR reviews at this point.
Yeah, why not reduce the team size to zero while you are at it?
These generalizations about software engineering have never been useful, IMO. Context is everything, there is no flow chart for building a perfect software process.
Although, I'd say you are absolutely delusional if you think we are universally beyond the point where manual review of pull requests is required.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#194What I find strange is how rarely LLM output is distributed alongside the LLM input, especially outside of code repos. Why can't I rerun the prompt that resulted in your work next year, when models have gotten better? Are people ashamed of their prompts? Ashamed of having used AI? i unno Prompt used to generate this message: "Create a comment for Hacker News which bemoans the lack of AI prompts being shared with the…
I think this is a gap in the tooling (Git, VCS, and forges) and the Zed people are working on this
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#195> when [sending AI generated content to teammates], I take care to clearly label what is AI generated Reading AI-generated text for hours every day, it's obvious to me. I take care to make my messages easily readable. I don't care if they're AI-made, as long as they're short. I'm a very verbose person, and if I don't make an effort at being concise, I'm just as annoying as the average AI. Being flooded with AI text e…
Brevity is the big disaster of human-generated text since the rise of the phone as default device and the appearance of Twitter. To discuss matters with sufficient depth and nuance, one often has to write a few solid paragraphs. If people are now wincing at longform text because they automatically assume it was LLM-generated, then that bodes ill.
"poisoning the well"
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like one potential interpretation of his behavior is that he values his own time more than your time. I wonder if that's occurred to him.
Well, what's the solution here, he should ship less stuff?
He isn’t shipping anything. Asking for code review is not shipping.
This is the complaint:
> he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at.
He has traded readability for volume. The lack of readability is causing him to ship less. This was a bad trade because the readability is the bottleneck not the code creation. He should improve readability.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, what's the solution here, he should ship less stuff?
The solution is to merge more of his PRs on the condition that he takes at least partial responsibility for any resulting problems.
That's not how anything works. Even if he says he's going to take responsibility, when the customer call comes in at midnight you're going to be the one fixing his problems.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#198A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…
It sounds like one potential interpretation of his behavior is that he values his own time more than your time. I wonder if that's occurred to him.
Everybody values their own time more than other's.
The fix, imho, is for the reviewers to also use ai to review the code. However, the ultimate responsibility for the outcome(s) should be on the committer - you commit it, you own it, so to speak. If there's an incident, they need to be the one paged in the middle of the night. Bugs resulting from it will land on their desk.
The reviewers aren't a shield/safety net.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#199[deleted]
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Either that, or call them / walk up to their desk and pick a point from the wall of text and ask them to explain what they mean by it. Then watch them turn red as they have no idea what the message they sent to you means.
I think you're over-estimating how much some people care. I have had coworkers say "Oh I don't know, Claude added that" in response to questions like that without even a hint of shame or self-reflection.
And that's the point where you can stop to hide your true opinion, no? "How am I supposed to review a thing the supposed author didn't even read or understand himself?"