[maratc]

A personal anecdote from my previous place:

A junior developer was tasked with writing a script that would produce a list of branches that haven't been touched for a while. I've got the review request. The big chunk of it was written in awk -- even though many awk scripts are one-liners, they don't have to be -- and that chunk was kinda impressive, making some clever use of associative arrays, auto-vivification, and more pretty advanced awk stuff. In fact, it was actually longer than any awk that I have ever written.

When I asked them, "where did you learn awk?", they were taken by surprise -- "where did I learn what?"

Turns out they just fed the task definition to some LLM and copied the answer to the pull request.

[simonw]

I wonder if it would work to introduce a company policy that says you should never commit consensus aren't able to explain how it works?

I've been using that as my own personal policy for AI-assisted code and I am finding it works well for me, but would it work as a company company policy thing?

[vunderba]

I call this the "house scrabble rule" because I used to play regularly with a group who imposed a rule that said you couldn't play a word without being able to define it.

[maratc]

I assume that would be seen as creating unnecessary burden, provided that the script works and does what's required. Is it better than the code written by people who have departed, and now no one can explain how it works?

The developer in question has been later promoted to a team lead, and (among other things) this explains why it's "my previous place" :)

[patrickmay]

This should be (the major) part of the code review.

[luckylion]

One of the advantages of working with people who are not native english-speakers is that, if their english suddenly becomes perfect and they can write concise technical explanations in tasks, you know it's some LLM.

Then if you ask for some detail on a call, it's all uhm, ehm, ehhh, "I will send example later".