[rednafi]

I have always enjoyed the feeling of aporia during coding. Learning to embrace the confusion and the eventual frustration is part of the job. So I don’t mind running in a loop alongside an agent.

But I absolutely loathe reviewing these generated PRs - more so when I know the submitter themselves has barely looked at the code. Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day. Reviewing this junk has become exhausting.

I don’t want to read your code if you haven’t bothered to read it yourselves. My stance is: reviewing this junk is far more exhausting. Coding is actually the fun part.

[bmurphy1976]

> Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day.

That's a big red flag if I ever saw one. Corporate should be empowering the engineering team to use AI tooling to improve their own process organically. Is this true or exaggeration? If it's true I'd start looking for a more balanced position at more disciplined org.

[rednafi]

True at Doordash, Amazon, and salesforce - speaking from experience.

[chewbacha]

Mandates are becoming normal. Most devs don’t seem to want to but they want to keep their jobs.

[shimman]

Definitely a sign that workers aren't being exploited.

[civvv]

10k LoC per day? Wow, my condolences to you.

On a different note: something I just discovered is that if you google "my condolences", the AI summary will thank you for the kindness before defining its meaning, fun.

[hnthrow0287345]

>Reviewing this junk has become exhausting.

Nitpick it to death. Ask the reviewer questions on how everything works. Even if it looks good, flip a coin and reject it anyway. Drag that review time out. You don't want unlucky PRs going through after all.

Corporate is not going to wake up and do the sensible thing on its own.

[rednafi]

Ha ha I wish. Then both corporate and your coworkers hate you.

Also, there is no point in asking questions when you know that they just yoloed it and won't be able to answer anything.

We have collectively lost our common sense and reasonable people are doing unreasonable things because there's an immense amount of pressure from the top.

[ForHackernews]

It's their share price. Vibe code gets vibe reviews. #shipit

[anonzzzies]

I always wonder where HNers worked or work; we do ERP and troubleshooting on legacy systems for medium to large corps; PRs by humans were always pretty random and barely looked at as well, even though the human wrote it (copy/pasted from SO and changed it somewhat); if you ask what it does they cannot tell you. This is not an exception, this is the norm as far as I can see outside HN. People who talk a lot, don't understand anything and write code that is almost alien. LLMs, for us, are a huge step up. There is a 40 nested if with a loop to prevent it from failing on a missing case in a critical Shell (the company) ERP system. LLMs would not do that. It is a nightmare but makes us a lot of money for keeping things like that running.

[sarchertech]

I currently work at one of the biggest tech companies. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and I’ve worked at scrappy startups, unicorns, and medium size companies.

I’ve certainly seen my share of what I call slot driven development where a developer just throws things at the wall until something mostly works. And plenty if cut and paste development.

But it’s far from the majority. It’s usually the same few developers at a company doing it, while the people who know what they’re doing furiously work to keep things from falling apart.

If the majority of devs were doing this nothing would work. My worry is that AI lets the bad devs produce this kind of work on a massive scale that overwhelms the good devs ability to fight back or to even comprehend the system.

[rednafi]

I also work at a huge company, and this observation is true. The way AI is being rammed down our throats is burning out the best engineers. OTOH, the mediocre simian army “empowered” by AI is pushing slop like there’s no tomorrow. The expectation from leadership, who tried Claude for a single evening, is that you should be able to deliver everything yesterday.

The resilience of the system has taken a massive hit, and we were told that it doesn’t matter. Managers, designers, and product folks are being asked to make PRs. When things cause Sev0 or Sev1 incidents, engineers are being held responsible. It’s a huge clown show.

[gopher_space]

> The expectation from leadership, who tried Claude for a single evening, is that you should be able to deliver everything yesterday.

"Look, if the AI fairy worked like that our company would be me and the investors."

I should make t-shirts. They'll be worth a fortune in ironic street cred once the AI fairy works like that.

[anonzzzies]

Tech companies. How about massive non software tech companies. I don't know where it is not the norm and I have been in very many of them as supplier for the past 30 years. Tech companies are a bit different as they usually have leadership that prioritizes these things.

[sarchertech]

None tech companies too. You can’t build large scale software with everyone merging PRs like that. My guess is that if you’re a supplier your are getting a pretty severe sampling bias.

[nightpool]

I would hope that most people who are technically competent enough to be on HN are technically competent enough to quit orgs with coding standards that bad. Or, they're masochists who have taken on the chamllenge of working to fix them

[duskdozer]

Half the posts here are talking about how they 100xd their output with the latest agentic loop harness, so I'm not sure why you would get that impression.

[heromal]

Neither of those. The pay is great and if all leadership cares about is making the whole company "AI Native" and pushing bullshit diffs, I'll play ball.

[theshrike79]

Claude has a built-in /simplify command

I think you just need to add a /complexify one with the same pattern, ask the AI to make everything as complex and long-winded as possible, LOC over clarity

[dyauspitr]

I do “TDD” LLM coding and only review the tests. That way if the tests pass I ship it. It hasn’t bitten me in the ass yet.

[shiandow]

The one thing I don't quite get is how running a loop alongside an agent is any different from reviewing those PRs.

[xyzal]

10k, really? Are you supposed to understand all that code? This is crazy and a one way street to burnout.

[rednafi]

Yep and now we are encouraged to use AI to review the code as well. But if shit hits the fan then you are held responsible.

[bsjshshsb]

Use AI to review.