I call it L-ai-ziness and I try to reduce it on my team.
If it has your name on it, you're accountable for it to your peers. If it has our name on it as a company, we're accountable for it to our users. AI doesn't change that.
AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility
41–50 of 75 posts
Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility
#42This is consistent with my own observations of LLM-generated code increasing the burden on reviewers. You either review the code carefully, putting more effort into it than the actual original author. Or you approve it without careful review. I feel like the latter is becoming more common. This is basically creating tech debt that will only be realized later by future maintainers
or, if you know it was written by an LLM, reject it
Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility
#43Unfortunately the list of AI edits this person declares at the bottom of their post is self-refuting
If you use AI as a Heads-up Display you can't make a giant scroll of every text change you accepted.
Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility
#44> After I “Requested changes” he’d get frustrated that I’d do that, and put all his changes in an already approved PR and sneak merge it in another PR. This is outrageous regardless of AI. Clearly there are process and technical barriers that failed in order to even make this possible. How does one commit a huge chunk of new code to an approved PR and not trigger a re-review? But more importantly, in what world does…
Collaborative software development is a high-trust activity. It simply doesn't work in low-trust environment. This is not an issue with code review, it is an issue with maintaining a trust environment for collaboration.
Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility
#45> After I “Requested changes” he’d get frustrated that I’d do that, and put all his changes in an already approved PR and sneak merge it in another PR. This is outrageous regardless of AI. Clearly there are process and technical barriers that failed in order to even make this possible. How does one commit a huge chunk of new code to an approved PR and not trigger a re-review? But more importantly, in what world does…
It really demotivated me when this happened, I just kept seeing the PR open, but then I saw the changes applied before the PR was merged, which made me very confused. I then had an alert placed on every one of the updates made by Mike to make sure he didn't do this again. People were against "reset reviewers on commit" for "agility".
Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility
#46Pointless blog post about made up situations that never happened. 1. Companies that push and value slop velocity do not have all these bureaucratic merge policies. They change them or relax them, and a manager would just accept it without needing to ping the author. 2. If the author was on the high paladin horse of valuing the craft he would not be working in such a place. Or he would be half assing slop too while co…
I think you're being overly pessimistic about the chance this exists in some form at nearly every mid-to-large size software company.
It doesn't take a company policy for an ai-enabled engineer to start absolutely spewing slop. But it's instantly felt by whatever process exists downstream.
I think there's still a significant quantity of engineers who value the output of AI, but at the same time put the effort in to avoid situations like what the author is describing. Reviewing code, writing/generating appropriate tests (and reviewing those too). The secret is those are the good ones. These are the ones you SHOULD promote, laud, and set as examples. The rest should be made examples of and be held accountable.
Id hope my usages of AI are along these lines. I'm sure I'm failing at some of the points, and always trying to improve.
Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility
#47> After I “Requested changes” he’d get frustrated that I’d do that, and put all his changes in an already approved PR and sneak merge it in another PR. This is outrageous regardless of AI. Clearly there are process and technical barriers that failed in order to even make this possible. How does one commit a huge chunk of new code to an approved PR and not trigger a re-review? But more importantly, in what world does…
Yeah this never happened. This just sounds like an and everyone clapped moments, made to make a blog post. Most people on this planet are reasonable if not pushed.
I'm not sure how to prove otherwise, but this actually happened to me. I don't understand this kind of comments saying "FAKE" for views or blog-posting. This is something that happened to me, and I can say for sure people were really pushed in this situation to ship faster every time.
Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility
#48> After I “Requested changes” he’d get frustrated that I’d do that, and put all his changes in an already approved PR and sneak merge it in another PR. This is outrageous regardless of AI. Clearly there are process and technical barriers that failed in order to even make this possible. How does one commit a huge chunk of new code to an approved PR and not trigger a re-review? But more importantly, in what world does…
TFA wouldn’t blame ‘Mike’ but I definitely would. And ‘Mike’s Boss.
That’s not just a process error. At some point you just have to feed back to the right person that someone isn’t up to the task.
Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility
#49I have no idea what AI changes about this scenario. It's the same scenario as when Mike did this with 1600 lines of his own code ten years ago; it just happens more often, since Mike comes up with 1600 lines of code in a day instead of in a sprint. > I don’t blame Mike, I blame the system that forced him to do this. Bending over backwards not to be the meanie is pointless. You're trying to stop him because the system…
> Bending over backwards not to be the meanie is pointless.
This thinking that we must avoid blaming individuals for their own actions and instead divert all blame to an abstract system is getting a little out of control. The blameless post-mortem culture was a welcome change from toxic companies who were scapegoating hapless engineers for every little event, but it's starting to seem like the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Now I keep running into situations where one person's personal, intentional choices are clearly at the root of a situation but everyone is doing logical backflips to try to blame a "system" instead of acknowledging the obvious.
This can get really toxic when teams start doing the whole blameless dance during every conversation, but managers are silently moving to PIP or lay off the person who everyone knows is to blame for repeated problems. In my opinion, it's better to come out and be honest about what's happening than to do the blameless performance in public for feel-good points.
Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility
#50> Mike sent me a 1600 line pull-request with no tests, entirely written by AI, and expected me to approve it immediately as to not to block him on his deployment schedule.
Both Mike and the manager are cargo-culting the PR process too. Code review is what you do when you believe it's worth losing velocity in order for code to pass through the bottleneck of two human brains instead of one.
LLMs are about gaining velocity by passing less code through human brains.