I was a tech lead leading a team that was given aggressive deadlines without our input and was measured and evaluated by MR count. My team started vibe coding and put the burden on me (or AI) to do all the reviewing while they sat there telling Claude “ok” all day and making sure tests passed.
The MRs grew to minimum 800 lines, multiple per day per person. No one could explain how it really worked, and it took me 2 hours to read and understand the code, even though AI provided a very long and thorough description with paragraphs of comments everywhere. My brain just wanted to shut off.
When I had any negative feedback or constructive criticism, team members grew worried they would look bad for going any slower than 3x speed, and for any chance of jeopardizing a deadline we didn’t have any input on. There just wasn’t any time for learning or mentorship, and MRs couldn’t be held up for too long. And of course, me spending the entire day reading MRs made my metrics look bad because I wasn’t writing any code.
Eventually I realized that the slop debt was so bad that when it breaks, I wouldn’t be able to explain how any of it worked. And that was my job to do so! We basically wrote two years of tech debt in two months. So I did myself a favor and walked out on my own terms.
Since then, I’ve slowly been reeling back from full agentic programming to doing things by hand. And even if it’s slower, I prefer it 100%. I understand what’s going on. The code follows patterns I can standardize around and has been stripped away of what’s unnecessary, so that I can understand how it works at a glance. Consistent naming, patterns and architecture allow me to reduce the amount of context I have to hold in my working memory.
When I’m verifying slop debt, my brain gets so exhausted, it really isn’t worth the feeling that I’m saving time and not coding anymore in exchange for reviewing slop all day. Even if I make the agent do exactly what I ask, it always does something in a way I don’t want it, so then it’s either me prompting all day to get it just right, or just moving on with something that’s “good enough”. And I’ve found that waiting for a response makes my mind wander and either get more exhausted context switching on another session or stumbling on some form of entertainment that makes me lose the time I would have “saved”.
Ultimately I feel like becoming a code reviewer as my profession is not worth it and just saying “I’ll fix it later if it breaks” is not worth it either. I prefer to have full comprehension of how the system works than to rely on AI to do it for me while the slop debt keeps growing endlessly.