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If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
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Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#162Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#163A 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 the best performers. I was discussing this with a friend of mine who runs a small company. Exact same thing. He reduced the team size by 1 and the velocity went up almost instantly. This person was a bottleneck in the team and was slowing down people around him. After identifying the problem, solving it unblocked the rest of the team.
This was true long before AI. With AI the difference is just a lot bigger. It exposes team inefficiencies quite mercilessly. We have a big glaring issue with the current AI tools not being to suitable for usage by multiple users. All interactions are one on one. Which means hand offs between tools and people are bottle necked on people communicating with each other. So, any issues there with people delaying, gate keeping, etc. become very visible.
The sentiment of pushing back on AI is understandable but probably not a productive reflex. We need to find more effective ways on staying on top of massive amounts of changes. It's not going to slow down and insisting on manually reviewing all code is not going to be a long term sustainable way of developing software. It simply does not scale. I'd question the added value of manual PR reviews at this point. Are they finding real issues? Are we valuing those issues correctly? Could we come up with automated ways to find and fix those same issues? There are a lot of open questions about how we are going to do this. But no question about the notion that we need to up our game on this front.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#164A 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…
Have you spoken to him about this? If he's clueless enough to send AI responses to human messages, he's probably clueless enough to not realise why people don't do that.
Better yet, get Claude to speak to him about it.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
having worked in tech and now running my own company.. the honest truth is that maybe 10-20% of SWE (at best) are “good”. sure it is harsh but i won't lie. if you're good you'll probably relate. the rest kind of suck. i’ve never gotten anything lower than Exceeds Expectations in my career so I’ve seen how awful some engineers were. i’ve seen how amazing a tiny minority were and i made them my mentors. these days i ha…
Everybody talks about finding that mythical 10X but in my recent hiring experience it's more like there's a whole bunch of 0Xs and the trick is finding the actual 1Xs among them.
Also now is it 1x in individual productivity or >=1x in team productivity. As anyone multiplying teams productivity by less than one is bad. Probably lot worse than actual 0x.
Someone who produces absolutely nothing and have no impact has cost, but is still better than someone who produces net negative. And the people who solely act as interface between LLM and whatever might fall to later category.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fight fire with fire. Ask Fable to conduct an adversarial /ultareview of their PR and send the same wall of text back to them. If there are excessive defects, ask them in standup if they actually reviewed the PR themselves before sending it. If there aren’t maybe they are on to something. I think like in law, the human submitting the work is responsible for its quality, not the AI.
> Ask Fable to conduct an adversarial /ultareview of their PR and send the same wall of text back to them. Not necessary. Use Haiku. The response doesn't need to be good , it just needs to be substantial. Presumably the goal here is basically DoS of the problematic colleague through token limits.
Use DeepSeek or MiMo. You get best bang for the buck on your response.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
REJECTED: Engineer does not understand what they wrote.
Feels like the title of a blog post someone will write
Ah, like this one? https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#168How about reviving key signing parties?
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will help if your wall of text cost less tokens than theirs, they will run out before you do if you have the same company quota per person.
I'm not sure what the right vocabulary would be to describe this, but this sounds more like the calculations behind nuclear war than a healthy collegiality or cooperative work relationship. This sets up a competition to determine a loser based on resource scarcity, not a way to achieve mutual goals to advance the organization's goals.
When someone submits PRs fulky made by Clade any "cooperative work" is out the door
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of us actually take the "engineering" in "software engineering" seriously. That includes taking responsibility and accountability so that the software doesn't become a sad and dangerous mess. If we want to be an engineering discipline, just yoloing in production is not going to cut it.
This no longer works when bad faith actors will push code straight from LLMs with little review, and respond to your comments with LLM responses. They will constantly leave you with the responsibility of verifying the output. You are the human in their loop. This is a brutal asymmetry. In the past, at least you knew a person probably spent more time handwriting code than you will spend reviewing it. This no longer ap…
Oh but it does.
The thing that makes it scale is to default to "no" and require the other party to convince you of "yes". Just put the burden of proof where it belongs. If they don't manage, then that's their problem.
Communicating this in a way that is viable for a business scenario certainly comes with its own difficulties, but that is a solvable problem.
In fact, you can use AI to stress test your communication there. Just throw what you want to say at the AI but don't tell it that it is you who wrote it. Then tune the input until it stops saying that you're the problem and starts agreeing with you.
Highly recommend. It's a perfect emotion-driven cargo-culting normie simulator that never calls HR on you.