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Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He spent most of his day explaining why this shouldn't be merged. "Explain to me in detail exactly how and why this works, or I'm not merging." This should suffice as a response to any code the developer did not actively think about before submitting, AI generated or not.
"You're absolutely right— This code works by [...]"
Implement a no workslop policy. Reputation will take care of the rest. Basically an educational task.
My friends job of late has basically become reviewing AI-generated slop his non-technical boss is generating that mostly seems to work and proving why it's not production-ready. Last week he was telling me about a PR he'd received. It should have been a simple additional CRUD endpoint, but instead it was a 2,000+ loc rats nest adding hooks that manually manipulated their cache system to make it appear to be working w…
> He spent most of his day explaining why this shouldn't be merged. "Explain to me in detail exactly how and why this works, or I'm not merging." This should suffice as a response to any code the developer did not actively think about before submitting, AI generated or not.
> AI-generated slop his non-technical boss is generating
It’s his boss. The type of boss who happily generates AI slop is likely to be the type of person who wants things done their way. The employee doesn’t have the power to block the merge if the boss wants it, thus the conversation on why it shouldn’t be merged needs to be considerably longer (or they need to quit).
As someone who has spent the last 30 years honing my craft (programming), all I can say is this: ha ha!
I love programming, but I also love building things. When I imagine what having an army of mid-level engineers that genuinely only need high level instruction to reliably complete tasks, and don't require raising hundreds of millions while become beholden to some 3rd party, would let me build... I get very excited.
It's kind of a mirror image of the global AI marketing hype-factory: Always pump/promote the ways it works well, and ignore/downplay when it works poorly.