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AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility

danielsada.tech

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Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility

#61

Post by AndrewDucker »

dshacker wrote: post #5
throwawaysleep wrote: post #3

> Then, I’d get a ping from his manager asking on why am I blocking the review. If you are in a culture like this, you may as well just ship slop. Management wants to break stuff, that is on them.

Right, I think there is always a balance between being strict on code reviews, and just letting people ship stuff. I've also seen the other end of the stick in which a senior employee is blocking an important pr over "spacing".

Your software linting should be automated, and if possible it should be formatted automatically.

It really shouldn't be possible to have arguments in a PR over formatting.

Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility

#62

Post by epolanski »

noitpmeder wrote: post #46
epolanski wrote: post #17

Pointless 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 a…

Regardless, this is a made up story.

If author cared about code and processes he'd not be working in an environment that doesn't.

On top of that, it's never a good policy to wash laundry in public.

Thus imho this story is made up and this never happened.

Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility

#63

Post by dgxyz »

shimman wrote: post #32
dgxyz wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I paid my mortgage off by being the insurance policy when that happens.

How does that work? I find the ability to be in these positions as an IC really impossible nowadays. Maybe it was easier in the 90s? I heard contracting was a way better gig back then too, until corpos got all high and mighty about it putting an end to the practice by favoring head shops instead.

Get in early. Know everything. Wide skill set. Arcane stuff.

Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility

#64

Post by noitpmeder »

epolanski wrote: post #62
noitpmeder wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Regardless, this is a made up story. If author cared about code and processes he'd not be working in an environment that doesn't. On top of that, it's never a good policy to wash laundry in public. Thus imho this story is made up and this never happened.

I can tell you for a fact this exact behavior, aggressive manager included, exists at my company.

Thankfully they're in a different org/reporting line, but this exists in the real world.

Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility

#65

Post by urbandw311er »

epolanski wrote: post #17

Pointless 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…

That’s unfair - I see no reason to believe this didn’t happen

Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility

#66

Post by storystarling »

dshacker wrote: post #9
xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #2

If you get a 1600 line PR you just close it and ask them to break it up into reviewable chunks. If your workplace has an issue with that, quit. This was true before AI and will be true after AI.

I mean, there are some exceptions on when 1600 PRs are acceptable (Refactorings, etc) but otherwise agree. What really bugs me is that today, it is easier than ever to do this (even the LLM can do this!) and people still don't do it.

I ended up overengineering a LangGraph workflow to handle this. It forces the LLM to generate and pass its own tests in a sandbox before I even see the PR. The API costs are significantly higher because of the retry loops, but it filters out the low effort attempts.

Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility

#67

Post by dmmartins »

madeofpalk wrote: post #28
dmmartins wrote: post #15

> What was your thought process using AI? > Share your prompts! Share your process! It helps me understand your rationale. why? does it matter? do you ask the same questions for people that don't use AI? I don't like using AI for code because I don't like the code it generates and having to go over and over until I like it, but I don't care how people write code. I review the code that's on the PR and if there's I do…

> why? does it matter? do you ask the same questions for people that don't use AI? …yes? If someone dumps a PR on me without any rationale I definitely want to understand their thought process about how they landed on this solution!

why? the code output is the important thing, not how people get to it. you may need help understanding what the code does, or you may question why they didn't do it some other way you think is better, but if the code does what it's supposed to do, doesn't matter if the person dreamed about the solution, copy the answer from a google search or some AI did it.

Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility

#68

Post by quesomaster9000 »

dog4hire wrote: post #54
xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #2

If you get a 1600 line PR you just close it and ask them to break it up into reviewable chunks. If your workplace has an issue with that, quit. This was true before AI and will be true after AI.

Some people can write 1-3k lines of good code (incl. tests) in a day when everything is just right. We used to be called 10xers lol. The 1600LOC PR is legit if trust is there, it's really a single change unit, it's not just being thrown over a wall (should have a great PR description and clear, concise commit history). I automatically block PRs with LLM-generated summaries, commit messages, documentation, etc.

Some people get so precious about code bases and want everything to be 100 line digestable units that working with them is becomes near impossible when they dig their heels in.

It's like dealing an angry grandpa throwing mud over your newly cleaned car, "You gotta start at the wheels lad, not the windows, do it again".

Great, now you've broken the flow, I have to re-do everything, figure out which tests to introduce in which order and unravel them all, ironically this is where I've found more bugs creeping in, because you're no longer diligent - you're appeasing performatively.

Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility

#69

Post by augusteo »

Large, hard-to-review PRs existed long before AI. The fix is the same: reject them, ask for smaller chunks. If your team doesn't have the culture to do that, AI just accelerates the dysfunction that was already there.

The teams I've seen struggle with this usually have a review bottleneck problem. One or two people doing all the reviews, so they wave things through. AI didn't cause that.

Re: AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility

#70

Post by frizlab »

emeraldd wrote: post #35
xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #2

If you get a 1600 line PR you just close it and ask them to break it up into reviewable chunks. If your workplace has an issue with that, quit. This was true before AI and will be true after AI.

There are a number of cases where this is not really possible. For some classes of updates, the structure of the underlying application and the type of update being made requires that you do an "all or nothing" type of update in order to get a buildable result. I've run into this a lot with Large Java applications where we have to jump several Spring versions just due to the scope of what's being updated. More increm…

That has happened (and still happens) at my company, but in this case we are upfront about it. We communicate that we’ll have to do a very big PR, propose to peer-review it, etc.

There are solutions.

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