AI doesn't directly make this stuff worse, it accelerates a team's journey towards embracing engineering practices around the code being written by humans or LLMs.
To start things off the meeting, I would say something like, "To me this is a surprising PR. I would expect it to be maybe 500(e.g.) lines including unit tests. Why does it need to be this complicated?"
If your manager just folds over, I would just accept it, because he's probably so beat down by the organization that he's not going to stick up for his employees anyway. At that point, it's time to look for another job.
But if the managers listen to their employees, and you have a better alternative, and your arguments are reasonable, it should be fine.
Usually within a few questions the answer "the AI wrote it that way" will come out.
Which feels bananas to me, like you don't understand how the code you PR is doing what you want? That would feel like showing up to work with no pants on for me.
You can use the LLM to generate as much documentation on the changes as you want. Just give it your PR. If someone tries to reject your vibe coded AI slop, just generate more slop documentation to drown them in it. It works every time.
If they push back, report them to their manager for not being "AI first" and a team player.
This is not new stuff, Goldratt warned us about this twenty+ years ago.
AI slop code is becoming the go-to way for a lot of written code. At some point it’ll make more sense to find a solution to the problem (“how to be confident in slop code”), rather than going against the financial motives of the business owners (cut expenses, maximize profit somehow through AI). I’m not sure if it’s right or wrong, but it is what it is.
I don't think I've ever worked in a company that would fire someone for something like that. Maybe you'd get a scheduled conversation to talk about it, to try to resolve whatever is going on (in this case verbose AI slop PRs), since obviously something is going wrong when people start engaging in malicious compliance.
But then I also never worked in a country where people can be fired for whatever reason, it's always been a legal requirement (in the countries I've lived at least) that the firing needs to be properly justified and explained, and firing someone like that wouldn't be justified.
What's so non-coop in this? This huge PR is a non-coop work and it requires to be fixed. Just imagine if someone locks the work of the whole branch just to review 9000 LOC, which they even didn't wrote. It's just no-go option
And even if there would be an AI which explains what this code is doing, people wouldn't be able to check it manually in reasonable time. It just enormous piece of work. So until there is a solution to this, such PRs should be declined and rewritten
Also it seems like the worker who brought this code doesn't know how evaluate the complexity of the task relatively to the solution, so there is a question about their qualification and level