> I don't think "IDK Claude did that" is a valid excuse. Immediate rejection.
I strongly agree, however manager^x do not and want see report the massive "productivity" gains.
I strongly agree, however manager^x do not and want see report the massive "productivity" gains.
"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.
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.