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If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

tombedor.dev

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Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#411

Post by dude250711 »

Silasdev wrote: post #374

I had a new colleague on the team, who I had to on-board. I gave him a few simple tasks, just to get him into the whole setup. He literally copy/pasted my task description into Claude and asked it to complete the task. To begin with, I didn't suspect this, so when he asked for more help, I gladly wrote up a detailed explanation with more information and detail for him to learn. Little did I know, he never read it but…

> Not even sure how I should handle it, but my first instinct was to get extremely annoyed.

Have you watched Frieren? Just keep a distance from them.

https://frieren.fandom.com/wiki/Demon

"Demons are deceptive by nature, and typically speak with humans for a specific purpose, such as securing mercy or lowering vigilance. They treat language as a tool, using words without truly grasping their meaning. ..."

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#412

Post by [deleted] »

taneq wrote: post #133
doctorpangloss wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

let's take the two stories to management: "I'm writing tons of code, and the process is stumbling where the guy whose job it is to review code isn't reviewing it." "I'm not reviewing code." Sometimes I wonder: how does someone go and think so much about their coworkers, and never once think about how they themselves look? Even if I sympathize with the people complaining about their poorly chosen GitHub-based workflow…

It’s much more effort to verify that code is correct than it is to produce it. This is the case even for human-written code, and now that we face a torrent of ok-looking probably-usable AI generated code, the problem is compounded infinitely. If someone’s using AI to generate a large quantity of actually-tested, actually-good code then that’s one thing. If they’re generating a fire hose of slop and demanding that oth…

[deleted]

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#413

Post by necovek »

swiftcoder wrote: post #321
fg137 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear they consider code review a personal activity than team activity, in the sense that they think "code review is a gate before my code can be merged" rather than "code review is a process where the team discusses, understands and improves the code". And that's not rare in teams. Lots of teams and developers do code review wrong. I even hear other people complain that I "block" their code review. I mean, if t…

> Lots of teams and developers do code review wrong In this sense, I'm not sure I've ever seen a team that does codereview "right". In the before times, most PR feedback was stylistic, with the occasional bug identified. Now that we have ubiquitous auto-formatters/linters/CI, most PR review falls into either "you misunderstood the spec", or "I disagree with your architectural choices" - and my personal feeling is tha…

How many teams did you see?

On your original claim, I have seen engineers put up 5x more PRs simply because they paid less attention to the quality or put less thought on each one of them.

I have seen people put up 5x more quality PRs too. But as long as they follow the good practice of doing a code review for every PR they put up (or 2 if you require 2 per PR), they got their stuff through quickly as well.

> your process ought to catch both of those well before the PR stage

We have multiple points where mistakes of any sort can be caught, and code review is one of them.

Yes, most architectural issues should be caught earlier, but some will only become evident in code: some by the dev themselves, others by reviewers.

This is only a problem if you mostly catch architecture issues at code review phase.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#414

Post by CWuestefeld »

Archer6621 wrote: post #358
gwd wrote: post #335

"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer. Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own? Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.…

These kinds of principles are sensible at their core, and I am a big proponent of the mindset, but the main problem as a sibling comment pointed out in a way is that this assumes that everyone is striving for an honest and accurate correlation between display of effort and value, and that everyone is looking deep enough into and behind that display to recognize the true value behind it. But actual effort, let alone v…

an honest and accurate correlation between display of effort and value

Hmmm. Your choice of words here has just sparked a realization for me.

Before you said this, I was completely on board with the original post. But in juxtaposing effort with value, it illustrates that we're basing the idea on the Labor Theory of Value. That idea seems intuitive, and Adam Smith wrote about it 250 years ago. But it turns out that LTV is very wrong. Economists showed that effort does NOT impart value.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#415

Post by necovek »

teiferer wrote: post #302
swiftcoder wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that…

> Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans If that's genuinely your attitude then your org has a problem. Code review is slow and less fun, for the average sw eng. But for high quality work it's indispensable. So treat code reviews as a scarce resource. Optimize for code reviewer time and attention. Have your PRs the right size? Are they well described? Do you give context? Do they fit in the bigger story? Do you…

I agree about how you can reciprocate for a good code review, but I'd just add that for me, code review is also fun — when done for a fellow human who I might be teaching.

It is definitely very grunt-like for an LLM.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#417

Post by necovek »

swiftcoder wrote: post #273
jvanderbot wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gently, as long as you work with humans, you should consider yourself working _for_ those humans. Everyone needs shared state to work from, and that's just the cost of doing business. That said, sometimes low-trust environments are the issue, not PRs. In a higher trust environment, PR review is a helpful thing you usually desire, not dread.

> In a higher trust environment, PR review is a helpful thing you usually desire, not dread Respectfully, in a high-trust environment, feedback should be delivered well before the PR stage. If you've let someone write a whole bunch of code without having a shared understanding of how the solution should work, you may have earlier process issues that PRs are papering over

A discussion ahead of the implementation can also bias the two parties to that discussion and have them overlook the same implementation issue: many things you only understand once you start implementing.

If you have these parties review each other's code, I agree that rarely brings much value.

I think the best way to understand our experience with reviews is to stop and say: in a few sentences, what do you expect out of a quality code review? (sounds like nothing in your case, but I am curious)

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#418

Post by necovek »

swiftcoder wrote: post #330
jonahx wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on how PRs function within teams. For some, the PR is a lightweight thing that is the preferred method of communication. It sounds like you are imagining a case where face to face communication, or communication over chat, is preferred for early stages, with the PR being a nearly final artifact. But it doesn't have to work like that.

I think that's a valuable point. Especially as LLMs bring the cost of prototyping down (and reduce emotional investment in code written), it may be more viable to use PRs as proposals/sketches of a solution. With human reviewers, I find that by the time someone has churned out enough of a solution to post a PR, they are already quite invested in specifics of the solution, and it makes it emotionally costly (to both a…

I have seen many a PR where it is obvious it is an exploratory work: eg. figuring out how to use an external dependency that is imperfectly or incorrectly documented, etc. (You can claim this should be done ahead of time, but experience tells me you need to code it to learn it)

The emotional toll there is real, but this is exactly the moment when you expose the knowledge of that external dependency to the unbiased party that is the reviewer.

I like combining approvals to satisfy the urge for completion and closure, with a request for fast-follow refactor to better match the newly discovered model of interaction. (The worst code review experience I have seen is when a reviewer accepts it as-is and does a fast follow refactor themselves, depriving the author of the opportunity to learn and remain an expert in that area)

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#419

Post by bisby »

hluska wrote: post #407
nucleardog wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had this same policy since before AI. I kind of formalized it for myself (and this team) after enough instances of "I'm trying to do X. It's not working. Help." type messages. You need to put as much effort into the question as you expect someone to put into the answer. It's not "fairness" or "AI" or anything else, it's that doing this any other way fundamentally fucks up the team dynamics. You have a problem. Y…

I don’t formalize anything that extreme for my teams because I can’t diagnose people, but I know that things like anxiety, imposter syndrome and a whole wack of things that aren’t related to work get involved. It’s acceptable to ask for help. I like to know what people have tried but sometimes they don’t know how to start. And that’s a great place to start. I guess we all have different styles but some may be more in…

How the problem and request are presented matter. "I don't know where to start" is a different problem than "I've done nothing, just solve this for me." And how someone shows an effort was made will vary person to person, so I agree a strict formalized set of rules doesn't make sense. The concept boils down to "expect people to put forth some effort of their own"

"Teams" are also going to have different dynamics than "strangers on a help forum."

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#420

Post by lasisdabomb »

Rekindle8090 wrote: post #16

If you use AI to write your communications I don't want to work with you

In a few years, you might not have any team members to work with! Tools like Slack MCP are ubiquitous at my company.

It will be a very sad day if I ever get laid off via Slack and the message is suffixed with "Sent by @Claude"

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