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Comment by arcboii92 | Hacker News Reader

LLMs moved the moments of despair to PR reviews for me. It used to be that you could check on a junior dev occassionally throughout the day to make sure they're on the right track. Now you step away for 2 hours and they're raising a PR of bad code smell spaghetti and moving on to repeat their AI slopfest on the next task.

It's getting hard to keep up with trying to teach new devs what bad code looks like. And I swear sometimes they just copy my PR comments into their AI tool to fix the mistakes without any of the learning.

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At some point there needs to be an uncomfortable conversation about how if all they’re doing is copy pasting everything they get from you into ChatGPT, you can do it yourself for much much cheaper.

how? management in most Tech companies are incentivizing them to do just that, so if you bring it up, they'll happily trot over to your manager to complain and then the uncomfortable conversation is you with management about why you're getting in the way of AI uptake by the team.

Don’t allow juniors to use AI. It’s like university exams: no programmable calculators allowed. Review assistants or senior who know what’s going on should though, it does help when used correctly

Write a damn good automated review agent that runs against their PRs before even looking at them… works well for me!

I've tried this without much luck. In my experience they get too bogged down on surface things and don't have the necessary business requirements/context to understand and find actual bugs.

How have you set yours up that works well for you?

So create a context document that explains the business context, and add that to the agent.

Take the bad result that you're getting, and pretend it's coming from an enthusiastic junior. What would you tell them to make them do this task better? Add that explanation to the agent (or explain that to the LLM and get it to add that to the agent, I have found this to work as well).

When you create a task for the LLM, get it to create a requirements document that lists all the requirements. Feed that into the review agent so it understands what the code agent was trying to do.

The LLM will do what you tell it to do. It doesn't magically understand what you want it to do. You have to tell it what to do.

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