Reviewing large AI PRs is the worst. I think being verbose is a good thing through function and variable naming, and comments for head scratching bits of cose, but AI can take it to an extreme degree with comments everywhere. Reading and critequing/discussing code and patterns used to be one of my favorite parts of the job.
My coworker who’s fully in bed with AI barely understood the code he wrote before, but asking him a question now is just an indirect means of using Claude. It has gotten to the point where I’m writing my PR comments more in the style of a prompt because it’s obvious he just pastes them in to Claude anyway.
One is a user that experiences a symptom that could be described in a quick copy/paste with maybe a sentence. Instead they have “AI” dig in and generate a dissertation on what it thinks is the issue and the original issue is lost in the AI diagnosis. Since the user doesn’t even have it wired up to actually test the hypothosis, it is just the AI first guess, which is frequently wrong. Wasting my time and failing to provide data.
The other is someone letting AI run over code and report “bugs” as in “it disagreed on some detail in the code, even though no person has actually experienced misbehavior, nor is the particular issue a security issue, but it might be an issue that some person one day eventually might hit”.
But I totally feel the coworker that had questionable code before that is now just utterly hopeless thanks to AI. I have nothing to do with his project but occasionally got called in to figure out and explain why his code would flip out. It hasn’t passed test in over a month as it’s now eternally buggy. Any attempt he makes to fix bugs inevitably lands with more bugs. But it’s too far now, he can’t turn back (CodeGen rewrote his codebase in a language he can’t follow, so he can’t hand edit, and he’s too afraid to roll back to when he almost understood his code). Hilarious one time within a week where he reported he could work on his project no more because he had exhausted his tokens, and without the tokens he can’t do anything anymore. Framed this as a failure of management to fund his needs adequately.
I have been shocked at just how many people, people long in the business seem to actively hate writing code. How much additional work they are willing to go through to claim victory in development through prose. Spending hours trying to get CodeGen to fix a trivial CSS issue in a web page that would have taken less than a minute if they just hit f12 and looked at the offending element. I can’t fathom how they could stand their careers for sometimes two decades before CodeGen came available if they hated it just so much.
Out of the few that said AI made their productivity better, most of them couldn’t code.
Note this point makes business leaders so excited. They hear “cheap labor can be productive”. Missing the point that the output is supremely dubious. They are “productive” because they don’t even know if the result is good or not, and so they can accept what is handed to them.
Currently, have a feature I thought we should have done, but management said one of the sales reps vibed up the answer, so we don’t need to do it. I used it and pointed out that the result was actually incorrect, but management thinks I’m just some luddite because they can’t understand the nature of the problems either.
Took me quite a few years to realize: when looking at usefulness of AI, I think in terms of “does it help me do my work better”. A lot of other people only think of “does it help to spew out more <whatever. lines of code? bug fixes? releases?>”
Another senior software dev here with nearly 20 years experience. I have never needed or used these tools. Cuz fuckem, that’s why.
Reviewing large AI PRs is the worst. I think being verbose is a good thing through function and variable naming, and comments for head scratching bits of cose, but AI can take it to an extreme degree with comments everywhere. Reading and critequing/discussing code and patterns used to be one of my favorite parts of the job.
My coworker who’s fully in bed with AI barely understood the code he wrote before, but asking him a question now is just an indirect means of using Claude. It has gotten to the point where I’m writing my PR comments more in the style of a prompt because it’s obvious he just pastes them in to Claude anyway.
One thing worse than AI PRs is AI bug reports.
One is a user that experiences a symptom that could be described in a quick copy/paste with maybe a sentence. Instead they have “AI” dig in and generate a dissertation on what it thinks is the issue and the original issue is lost in the AI diagnosis. Since the user doesn’t even have it wired up to actually test the hypothosis, it is just the AI first guess, which is frequently wrong. Wasting my time and failing to provide data.
The other is someone letting AI run over code and report “bugs” as in “it disagreed on some detail in the code, even though no person has actually experienced misbehavior, nor is the particular issue a security issue, but it might be an issue that some person one day eventually might hit”.
But I totally feel the coworker that had questionable code before that is now just utterly hopeless thanks to AI. I have nothing to do with his project but occasionally got called in to figure out and explain why his code would flip out. It hasn’t passed test in over a month as it’s now eternally buggy. Any attempt he makes to fix bugs inevitably lands with more bugs. But it’s too far now, he can’t turn back (CodeGen rewrote his codebase in a language he can’t follow, so he can’t hand edit, and he’s too afraid to roll back to when he almost understood his code). Hilarious one time within a week where he reported he could work on his project no more because he had exhausted his tokens, and without the tokens he can’t do anything anymore. Framed this as a failure of management to fund his needs adequately.
I have been shocked at just how many people, people long in the business seem to actively hate writing code. How much additional work they are willing to go through to claim victory in development through prose. Spending hours trying to get CodeGen to fix a trivial CSS issue in a web page that would have taken less than a minute if they just hit f12 and looked at the offending element. I can’t fathom how they could stand their careers for sometimes two decades before CodeGen came available if they hated it just so much.
Most developers reported AI made their productivity worse.
Out of the few that said AI made their productivity better, most of them couldn’t code.
Note this point makes business leaders so excited. They hear “cheap labor can be productive”. Missing the point that the output is supremely dubious. They are “productive” because they don’t even know if the result is good or not, and so they can accept what is handed to them.
Currently, have a feature I thought we should have done, but management said one of the sales reps vibed up the answer, so we don’t need to do it. I used it and pointed out that the result was actually incorrect, but management thinks I’m just some luddite because they can’t understand the nature of the problems either.
Took me quite a few years to realize: when looking at usefulness of AI, I think in terms of “does it help me do my work better”. A lot of other people only think of “does it help to spew out more <whatever. lines of code? bug fixes? releases?>”