I once wrote a similar essay on this topic. When I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer: https://orchidfiles.com/im-tired-of-ai-generated-answers/
Then, after I've put in all this work, the developer just replies with a copy-paste of what the LLM thinks about my comment. I have no idea if the developer read or understood my point. I have no idea if he agrees or not. It doesn't just seem disrespectful to the effort I put into the review, it also leaves me in a difficult position as a tech lead because I have no idea if the person who is ultimately responsible for this code understands the code, my feedback on the code, or the changes that the LLM made to address my feedback. If you're responsible for a feature, I want to be able to feel like you're thinking critically about how that feature works. Right now, I just feel like you're blindly doing everything that I tell you. It also feels like I'm shouting into the void. We're colleagues, we should be able to have a conversation about technical subjects!
The +/-2000 line MR was bad when humans wrote it. It’s way worse when the human didn’t even write or read it.
And just vomiting automated CodeRabbit talking points back and forth at each other feels equally harmful.
Are we really tolerating turning ourselves into LLM rubber stamps?
I have one project where there must be hundreds of pages of design proposals I have not read and will never read, because the author really likes having Claude generate complete design proposals based on incomplete understanding. So every week or two he sends me a new one, I spend 30 seconds skimming it, and then I tab back to Slack to ask him to explain.
I don't like working this way, but you know, I don't like doing rollouts either. It's certainly better than being a human rubberstamp.
Perhaps you could explain how this is different from rubber stamping, if it’s just 30 seconds of reading.
Does the conversation you have reveal what they actually want?
And what about the 2000 line change? Does that get stamped after someone talks about the change but without deeply reading it?
Do you know if there’s a way to incentivize them to lean toward doing the right thing first? Are the company and stakeholder goals and objectives in line with them making progress toward higher quality engineering? That is, are these juniors protected from randoms asking them to circumvent good process, etc?
> Are the company and stakeholder goals and objectives in line with them making progress toward higher quality engineering? That is, are these juniors protected from randoms asking them to circumvent good process, etc?
In my personal experience yes, but I've seen a few teams and heard stories of many more where the juniors are not protected and they just ship regressions and outages all the time now. I think the trend towards AI cost controls will mitigate this, although the impact will of course be uneven as companies behind the curve discover powerful agentic coding for the first time.
It worked for a while. There is a GitHub action that you can configure to fail if the PR is too large.
But then we started a new project and I didn’t add it right away since it’s a small team and I figured we could use the honor system.
Since then there have been lots of massive PRs but there’s not much willingness to go back to enforcing the rule because it might slow us down…
It’s frustrating.
Or even, even worse is when you get a PR from a co-worker, you spend a lot of time explaining why that's bad idea, only for the person to say "Sorry, my openclaw/etc posted that. I'll close it." Or even the opposite, you tell a co-worker: "Hey, it was a great idea to change X." and he says "X? What is X?... Oh that must have been my agent."
that's the point where i would want to start firing people. not because i want to replace them with AI, but because if they use AI to answer without contributing their own thoughts they make themselves replaceable.