[galoisscobi]

As much as I like Claude Code, Boris has done a lot of harm by encouraging software engineering practices that lead to slopware. We have two camps of people at work, the first camp are the agent goes brrr. They don't understand the code they write. They have loops running, agent orchestrators or agent hype du jour. The second camp is people who are inundated with PRs, are holding the line on quality, and just exhausted. We've also had some management pressures where they think people are wasting time looking at code. Perhaps because some podcast they might be listening to, somebody says coding is largely solved.

> I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops.

This is going to be a net negative on software quality for people who take this up, in my opinion.

I call out Boris but I also don't think he's being malicious. He's at the center of an important technological revolution and it would be hard not to get excited. I just wished he advocated for a more balanced and a realistic perspective.

[wavemode]

> We've also had some management pressures where they think people are wasting time looking at code.

I feel like this is the actual problem, but it's not being talked about enough.

Logically, it shouldn't matter how a piece of code was written. It either meets our engineering standards or it doesn't. That's what code review is for.

But what has actually happened is that, because we have AI now, many organizations have normalized practices that weren't normal before, like submitting 10000-line PRs. And just, in general, submitting code that you yourself don't seem to fully understand.

If management doesn't push back on such things (or will even push back against people who try to do so), then reviewers have basically no incentive to push back either. Before I left my last job (for unrelated reasons), I had entered this mode, wherein I decided I couldn't really carefully review these monstrous AI PRs, while also getting my own work done, while also not burning out. So I chose the latter two.

[Schiendelman]

Management can't "push back on such things". However, they can institute better quality assurance practices.

[meowface]

This sums up the dynamic: https://x.com/danhockenmaier/status/2021617680525172840

[pedromlsreis]

Right, which basically means that judgment compounds. AI just makes the slope steeper in both directions.

[Imustaskforhelp]

I wonder how much of the turbo brain developers time is spent on reviewing the code of slop cannons and how frustrated they must feel.

Previously, everyone was limited in their blast radius but now AI has levelled the playing field where even a single slop cannon be the bottleneck of PR reviews or even the company itself if not right now, then later, as the codebase turns sloppified which will have its ramifications later on.

Everyone might suggest with the diagram to be the turbo brains but I believe that we also need to reduce the metrics that slop cannon is achieving (surprisingly LOC which is a pretty bad indicator) and to be more reasonable throughout in realizing such bottlenecks and to follow good security practices throughout.

[pedromlsreis]

Reading through the thread, it's striking how many people are feeling the same mix of excitement and exhaustion you describe. I'm in that camp too... the tools are incredible, but the pace and expectations around them can feel overwhelming.

I fully agree with what you say regarding Boris, but I would emphasize that I don't think he has malicious intention either. He still is doing his job, to showcase the features their product offers.

[bob1029]

> We have two camps of people at work

I don't like the framing of this, but I suppose it's inevitable given how every other political issue has been framed to date.

There are many camps in between the two being described. There are those who use maybe $20 worth of unsubsidized tokens per month to accelerate their work. Full-time human in the loop, every LOC still reviewed by hand. Also, the developer who still does copy-paste in and out of ChatGPT. Those tribes exist too and are way more typical than these extremes.

[quincepie]

I have given up on spending more time reviewing PRs and help fixing bad decisions made by AI because all it does is encouraging the same thing without learning. Next PR will most likely contain similar design / code problems.

I can't speak for all orgs but at the end of the day, the only metric that my org cares about is how AI is improving our work. Holding the line for quality is definitely a good thing, but when your org doesn't care about the pressure on PR reviewers, and the effort it took to fix those PR mistakes or their repeat, those reviews are only helping the loop case and that AI is without flaws. I am not saying AI is a bad thing all together, but when the org ignores those metrics, I am only contributing and helping to prove that the other side is right.

[skepticATX]

Yes, I am exhausted. Most of my company is obsessed with agents, because everyone wants to be seen as AI first. There is little thought going into usage. No care for long term maintainability and quality. Our product is actively worse by many metrics, but no one cares because we marketing can say “agents”.

The sad part is that this technology is incredible. It’s us choosing to turn it into a slop cannon (and the labs sure seem to encourage this).

I want to leave the industry as soon as I can.

[piva00]

Same here, I think the tool is fantastic, it has helped me in lots of way professionally and for hobby projects involving skills I'm not experienced with but I'm absolutely exhausted.

The worst part is that I'm not exhausted from my work, I've been through a heavy burnout before and had to adapt my ways of working to not fall into that kind of exhaustion again. This is different, it's not a pressure to deliver anything specifically, no stupid deadlines, it's so much more vague than any other kind of work pressure I've been through in the past 20+ years that it makes it much harder to find ways to keep my head straight.

It's exhausting to be reviewing boatloads of PRs of very varied quality. I have relegated myself to block merges at the first sign of a bad/weird design instead of trying to understand why it might have needed a compromise in the design, many times people couldn't even explain to me why something was written the way it was... After many "it was Claude that decided this way" it became so tiring that I don't even ask anymore, I just leave a comment on the first blocker I find and reject the PR. If people are not putting any effort to review it before throwing it at me I will just return the favour.

[akomtu]

Reviewing AI slop is data labelling and it isn't very different from what people in 3rd world do labeling various images. Constant context switching is what causes the exhaustion. It's the equivalent of the 6pm stop and go traffic. You used to be an F1 driver. Now you're an instructor for bad drivers.

[Imustaskforhelp]

This too shall pass.

The journey was as important as the destination if not more because it gave confidence in oneself, it made us grow. I mean to suggest, coding for the sake of coding

"I wish to code for myself, nothing else": (I had written this somewhere else on HN): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48609962

If I may ask you and others, I assume that you are at a relatively decent position within your company and have somewhat say in it. Why aren't employees more honest about AI and concerns regarding it? I'd imagine that people must chalk it up as saying that there is push from investor side into using AI and management is forcing it but couldn't more effort be also redirected towards the fact that agents are still finnicky sometimes and that the sustainability of projects moving forward is going to be a major issue to investors given that they want sustainable growth.

It is my opinion that there's more hidden power in engineers that even we fail to realize and instead some of us like you are wanting to leave the industry, what a sad tail of tragic events, when the tech behind AI is good and could be helpful but oh holy, we are butchering it up so badly in some/so many regards perhaps even under the influence of AI companies and their messaging surrounding it.

[piva00]

> If I may ask you and others, I assume that you are at a relatively decent position within your company and have somewhat say in it. Why aren't employees more honest about AI and concerns regarding it?

We've tried it where I work at. People put effort to compile studies, to collect testimonials, catalog and organise the strengths and weaknesses based on engineers' experiences with the tooling.

The result was the person driving this effort getting asked by HR, their manager, and their skip manager to stop with the anti-AI rhetoric, that AI is the future of the industry and if not rolled out in this way we will be left behind.

> I'd imagine that people must chalk it up as saying that there is push from investor side into using AI and management is forcing it but couldn't more effort be also redirected towards the fact that agents are still finnicky sometimes and that the sustainability of projects moving forward is going to be a major issue to investors given that they want sustainable growth.

The C-level doesn't seem to care, they believe to be in an existential risk where any price paid to rollout these tools as wide and broadly as possible across the whole org is small compared to being left behind.

It's all fueled by executives and investors anxieties, there's very little left for reason when fear takes over.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Was the effort just directed be a single developer though. I have written elsewhere on HN[0] about something I have witnessed but I have seen that if only a single developer is actively against AI, the management actively believes that it is only that single person who is the bottleneck/issue as nobody else is complaining so it must all be right.

Although I get the overall statement more now as well.

> It's all fueled by executives and investors anxieties, there's very little left for reason when fear takes over.

This perhaps seems to be the greatest reason and I imagine that because all growth within economy is shown to be floating within AI related sector, they want piece of that pie. Do note that most of the issues with it is that the frothy evaluations and how much actual growth is happening downstream rather than just money shaking hands and the bubble nature of things.

but theoretically one can see that there is no winner in all of this no matter how deep one can fall down in layers of. Perhaps something at the layer of DRAM and chip production seem to be the one actually the most profitable at the moment and even they are just witnessing some temporary growth as nobody expects the prices to stay at this ceiling including said companies and yet they have incredibly floaty (but comparatively less so) valuations as compared to other AI things.

On one hand, I expect money to be rational yet on the other hand I am actively witnessing money to be irrational. Yet the whole industry is so muddled up now with so many people wanting the piece of cake of that investor's dollar that I imagine the market somewhat saturated.

Could something rationally not happen because if so, it seems that the thing might be that the burst of the bubble might make the only rational sense of adding realism in the market, but I imagine that it might spook the investors too much too and it might cost too much blood-shed in the markets.

Am I able to explain myself and do any of you believe that there is a rational course of action which can be taken to help stabilize the economy in some aspects?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630281

[foolserrandboy]

Inertia is on our side

[CodingJeebus]

> I call out Boris but I also don't think he's being malicious.

From a market perspective, he's acting completely rationally in his own interests. Bottom line is that these companies need to do whatever they can to keep growing token consumption because that's their goal.

If the nation's drinking skyrocketed, we wouldn't be sitting here wondering why the CEO of Budweiser isn't advocating for temperance. His job is to move kegs, just like Boris' job is to move tokens.

[turzmo]

I never understood this perspective. Just because a person's behavior is market-rational, it does not mean they can't be criticized for externalities.

That is, in fact, an important thing to do. It turns those externalities into public perception, which turns into market forces that adjust the behavior, if you want to think purely in market terms.

The analogy with Budweiser is not a good one. This would be the CEO of Budweiser actively pushing more drinking while the nation's drinking was increasing. And yes, people would be right, and effective, to oppose this (see Oxycontin).

[pjc50]

> can't be criticized for externalities

As soon as you open up the externalities discussion, the wider question of increasing electricity prices and turbocharging global warming comes up, not to mention RAM prices. AI is a machine for turning negative externalities into stock prices.

[nixon_why69]

Of course they can be criticized, we can criticize the ExxonMobil CEO the same way and get nowhere

The point is, blaming them is pointless, if it wasn't them it would be someone else. How do we react?

[Avicebron]

"If it's not them it would be someone else" probably should just be shorthanded to the banality of evil. But to answer your question, idk, sensible regulations? (Knowing full well this just kicks the buck of responsibility down the chain)

[nixon_why69]

For AI overdependence specifically, continuing to be a thinking human is resistance. Eventually the pendulum swings, you can't outhype reality forever. People will have outages where nobody human can explain why and the orgs/people who maintained understanding will survive better.

[jrmg]

His job is to do what’s in the long term interests of his company.

[Edit: was thinking of the ‘CEO’. This doesn’t apply as cleanly to Boris.]

[dofm]

FWIW, the CEO doesn't seem to be the CEO? If I understand what I read properly, he has one direct report — his "chief of staff". So arguably the true chief executive in a functional sense (the person to whom the organisation ultimately reports through hierarchy) is his sister, who appears to be grounded in reality.

I suspect that the reason Anthropic is generating such developer-negative, toxic, insensitive influencer sentiments like these from Boris has to do with Dario being a fantasy-fiction-reading quasi-mascot who thinks it's his job to tell scary stories, who is being allowed to do just that by a sibling who perhaps prefers he's not involved in the day-to-day.

[CodingJeebus]

Respectfully disagree. From my view, the tech industry hasn't behaved in a way that regards long-term interests over short-term interests in a very, very long time. Much of the innovation is simply finding new and creative ways to shrink this loop even further, and vibe-coding/slop is just the latest manifestation of that.

[iterateoften]

> we wouldn't be sitting here wondering why the CEO of Budweiser isn't advocating for temperance

But we would start to wonder if the CEO of Budweiser started advocating binge drinking.

[hughw]

As long as the LLM can unravel, repair, and improve the slopware it creates, that's where we are necessarily going. The code will continue to be maintainable, by the LLM. I'm used to this idea and I for one welcome...

[Tade0]

> This is going to be a net negative on software quality for people who take this up, in my opinion.

The silver lining appears to be that long term most people won't be able to afford producing slop at current rates.

[NamlchakKhandro]

Like Mario tried to do... But no one listened

[Aperocky]

I think at the end of this we'll have a new software engineering paradigm.

Mostly nobody now worry about binaries or instructions because those are for the compilers, even undefined behavior are mostly ignored.

You can either tailor the development pattern for LLM, or have LLM come write for the same old development pattern. I think there is going to be a difference.

[dofm]

We will have a new software engineering paradigm and it is called quitting to become a day drinker.

Burnout can be so all-encompassing that it can ruin your life. It can make you feel like you are losing your mind and your basic abilities. A lot of that is coming for a lot of people who are currently stressed but excited.