[flagged]
The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
21–30 of 78 posts
Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
#22Can definitely attest to this. The frequency of outages at my company have increased drastically the past year, especially ever since incorporating agentic development. I’m seeing all of the dev best practices go out the window. We have a few vibe coders that are posting 15-30 PR’s per day. It’s way too much for us to review. We’re not a big shop. I think we’re going to have to hire more people just to review code ac…
I wonder if the PR workflow is just unsustainable in the agentic era. Rather than review every new feature or bug fix, we would depend on good test coverage, and hold developers accountable for what they ship.
The result might be more faulty code getting merged, but if you already have outages and can't review every PR, is there currently a meaningful benefit to the PR workflow?
Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how do you cover such amount of multi tasking? Could you give an example? I mean what kind of tasks allow such a parallelization?
context switching across the entirety of the feature surface for an app You could easily have agents to work on login page, messaging feature, database/data model update, recommender system, backend api, etc
But you have to keep it in your head, and remember all stuff at the same time. How is it possible to track, and do reviews one after another? Or are these pretty long running agents?
Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
#24Can definitely attest to this. The frequency of outages at my company have increased drastically the past year, especially ever since incorporating agentic development. I’m seeing all of the dev best practices go out the window. We have a few vibe coders that are posting 15-30 PR’s per day. It’s way too much for us to review. We’re not a big shop. I think we’re going to have to hire more people just to review code ac…
I wonder if the PR workflow is just unsustainable in the agentic era. Rather than review every new feature or bug fix, we would depend on good test coverage, and hold developers accountable for what they ship. The result might be more faulty code getting merged, but if you already have outages and can't review every PR, is there currently a meaningful benefit to the PR workflow?
Diogenes carrying a lamp, looking for good test coverage
Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
#25Using vibe coding for frequent PRs seems insanely reckless.
In my scientific computing environment, the majority of my vibe coded output goes to one-off scripts, stuff that is not worth committing (correcting outputs, one-off visualizations, consistency checks), and anything worth committing gets further refined to an extent that it pretty much can't be considered vibe coded anymore. It's simply too risky, any bugs would propagate down to decision making for designing new, expensive instruments.
I imagine that the cost and trust risks in enterprise environments are similar, so this seems very reckless.
AI Agents have helped up my productivity, but that's specifically because I can focus on the science, and delegate the auxiliary things to AI. I also believe I get this productivity out of them because my supervisor really drove home how hard I need to go on consistency checks and years of having my visualizations nitpicked (so I am able to do the same to AI and recognize when results are suspicious).
Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
#26Can definitely attest to this. The frequency of outages at my company have increased drastically the past year, especially ever since incorporating agentic development. I’m seeing all of the dev best practices go out the window. We have a few vibe coders that are posting 15-30 PR’s per day. It’s way too much for us to review. We’re not a big shop. I think we’re going to have to hire more people just to review code ac…
People pushing dozens of PRs per day need to learn to prioritize tasks, and balance a bit more towards quality over quantity.
Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
#27Using vibe coding for frequent PRs seems insanely reckless. In my scientific computing environment, the majority of my vibe coded output goes to one-off scripts, stuff that is not worth committing (correcting outputs, one-off visualizations, consistency checks), and anything worth committing gets further refined to an extent that it pretty much can't be considered vibe coded anymore. It's simply too risky, any bugs w…
I love vibe coding for little tools like that. Tools which can have their outputs quickly validated, and then throw them away. Like a jig in woodworking.
Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
#28Using vibe coding for frequent PRs seems insanely reckless. In my scientific computing environment, the majority of my vibe coded output goes to one-off scripts, stuff that is not worth committing (correcting outputs, one-off visualizations, consistency checks), and anything worth committing gets further refined to an extent that it pretty much can't be considered vibe coded anymore. It's simply too risky, any bugs w…
Most people don't care. Leadership is demanding feature, feature, feature. IC are worried about losing their jobs and outages rarely cost most business actual money. So garbage gets shipped, outages rise, everyone is burned out but since they can't find another job, they remain.
Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
#29Is there any publication which demonstrates that the improvement is really 10x?
A watched pot never boils. A watched vibe coder never 10x-es.
Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
#30Can definitely attest to this. The frequency of outages at my company have increased drastically the past year, especially ever since incorporating agentic development. I’m seeing all of the dev best practices go out the window. We have a few vibe coders that are posting 15-30 PR’s per day. It’s way too much for us to review. We’re not a big shop. I think we’re going to have to hire more people just to review code ac…
People pushing dozens of PRs per day need to learn to prioritize tasks, and balance a bit more towards quality over quantity.
And maybe spend some time doing reviews for other developers. And if they aren't qualified to be, then maybe spend that time becoming qualified rather than pumping out more slop.