I strongly agree, however manager^x do not and want see report the massive "productivity" gains.

I know many who have it on from high that they must use AI. One place even has bonuses tied not to productivity, but how much they use AI.

Meanwhile managers ask if AI is writing so much code why aren't they seeing it on topline productivity numbers.

>> I know many who have it on from high that they must use AI. One place even has bonuses tied not to productivity, but how much they use AI.

> How does maximizing AI use prevents developers from reading their code?

In my mind developers are responsible for the code they push, no matter whether it was copy pasted or generated by AI. The comment I responded to specifically said "bonuses tied not to productivity, but how much they use AI". I don't see that using AI for everything automatically implies having no standards or not holding responsibility for code you push.

If managers force developers to purposefully lower standards just to increase PRs per unit of time, that's another story. And in my opinion that's a problem of engeneering & organisational culture, not necessarily a problem with maximizing AI usage. If an org is OK with pushing AI slop no one understands, it will be OK with pushing handwritten slop as well.

That's basically what I'm referring to.

"Claude did that" is functionally equivalent to "idk I copied that from r/programming" and is totally unacceptable for a professional

I have never seen this standard reached for any real codebase of any size.

Even in projects with a reputation for a strong review culture, people know who the "easy" reviewers are and target them for the dicey stuff (they are often the most overloaded... which only causes them to get more overloaded). I've seen people explicitly state they are just "rubber stamping" PRs. Literally no one reviews every line of third-party dependencies, and especially not when they are updated routinely. I've seen over a million lines of security-sensitive third-party code integrated and pushed out to hundreds of millions of users by a handful of developers in a matter of months. I've seen developers write their new green-field code as a third-party library to circumvent the review process that would have been applied if it had been developed as a series of first-party PRs. None of that had anything to do with AI. It all predated AI coding tools. That is how humans behave.

Does this create ticking time-bombs? It absolutely does. You do the best you can. You triage and deal with the most important things according to your best judgment, and circle back to the rest as time and attention allow. If your judgment is good, it's mostly okay. Some day it might not be. But I do not think that you can argue that the optimal level of risk is zero, outside of a few specialized contexts like space shuttles and nuclear reactors.

I know. It hurts my soul, too. But reality isn't pretty, and worse is better.

If you submit a PR and you yourself can not personally vouch for every line of code as a professional…then you are not a professional. You are a hack.

That is why these code generation tools are so dangerous. Sure, it's theoretically possible that a programmer can rely on them for offering suggestions of new code and then "write" that code for a PR such that full human understanding is maintained and true craft is preserved. The reality is, that's not what's happening. At all. And it's a full-blown crisis.

100% my takeaway after trying to parallelize using worktrees. While Claude has no problem managing more than one context instance, I sure as hell do. It’s exhausting, to the point of slowing me down.

Ask pretty much any FOSS developer who has received AI-generated (both code and explanations) PRs on GitHub (and when you complain about these, the author will almost always use the same AI to generate responses) about their experiences. It's a huge time sink if you don't cut them off. There are plenty of projects out there now that have explicit policy documentation against such submissions and even boilerplate messages for rejecting them.

That said, the models, or to be more precise, the tools surrounding it and the craft of interacting with it, are still improving at a pace where I now believe we will get to a point where "hand-crafted" code is the exception in a matter of years.

That will work, but only until the people filing these PRs go crying to their managers that you refuse to merge any of their code, at which point you'll be given a stern reprimand from your betters to stop being so picky. Have fun vibe-reviewing.

Nothing can move fast enough to keep up with these hype-fueled TED talk expectations all the way up the chain.

I don't know if there's any solution and I'm sure it's not like this everywhere but I'm also sure I'm not alone. At this point I'm just trying to keep my feet wet on "AI" related projects until the hype dust settles so I can reassess what this industry even is anymore. Maybe it's not too late to get a single subject credential and go teach math or finger painting or something.

So I guess if you asked Claude why it did that, the truth of it might be "IDK I copy pasted from StackOverflow"

The same stuff pasted with a different sticker. Looks good to me.

You're right, saying you got something off SO would get you laughed out of programming circles back in the day. We should be applying the same shame to people who vibe code, not encourage it, if we want human-parseable and maintainable software.

For whom is this a danger for?

If we're paid to dig ditches and fill them, who are we to question our supreme leaders? They control the purse strings, so of course they know best.

This is a very cruel punishment sometimes used in forced labor camps. You are describing torture.

I've also seen "Ask ChatGPT if you're doing X right?", and basically signing off whatever it recommends without checking

At this point I'm pretty confident I could trojan horse whatever decision I want from certain people by sending enough screenshots of ChatGPT agreeing with me

So, for example, by and large the orgs I've seen chucking Claude PRs over the wall with little review were previously chucking 100% human written PRs over the wall with little review.

Similarly, the teams I see effectively using test suites to guide their code generation are the same teams that effectively use test suites to guide their general software engineering workflows.

Lots of companies just accept bugs as something that happens.

Calendar app for local social clubs? Ship it and fix it later.

B2B payments software that triggers funds transfers? JFC I hope you PIP people for that.

Stack Overflow had enough provenance of copying and pasting. Models may not. Provenance remains a thing or it can add risk to the code.

It's not, and yet I have seen that offered as an excuse several times.

Inb4 the chorus of whining from AI hypists accusing you of being an coastal elitist intellectual jerk for daring to ask that they might want to LEARN something.

I am so over this anti-intellectual garbage. It's gotten to such a ridiculous place in our society and is literally going to get tons of people killed.