I’m reading the comments almost every day, and I write them only if I think I have a point, insight that the other 50 people in the comments didn’t have.
Lazyslop PRs offload the work to code reviewers while keeping all the benefits to the PR creator.
Now creating a 1600 loc PR is about ten minutes, reviewing it at the very least an hour. Mike submits a bunch of PRs, the rest of the team tries to review it to prevent the slop from causing an outage at night or blowing up the app. Mike is a hero, he really embraced AI, he leveraged it to get 100x productivity.
This works for a while, until everyone realizes that Mike gets the praise, they get reprimanded for not shipping their features fast enough. After a couple of these sour experiences, other developers will follow suit, embrace the slop. Now there is nobody that stops the train wreck. The ones who really cared, left, the ones who cared at least a little gave up, and churn out slop.
> put all his changes in an already approved PR and sneak merge it in another PR. I don’t blame Mike, I blame the system that forced him to do this.
Oh you should definitely blame Mike for this. It’s like blaming the system when someone in the kitchen spits in the food of customer. Working with people like this is horrible because you know they don’t mind to lie cheat deceive.
In a professional setting where you still have coding standards, and people will review your code, and the code actually reaches hundreds of thousands of real users, handling one agent at a time is plenty for me. The code output is never good enough, and it makes up stuff even for moderately complicated debugging ("Oh I can clearly see the issue now", I heard it ten times before and you were always wrong!)
I do use them, though, it helps me, search, understand, narrow down and ideate, it's still a better Google, and the experience is getting better every quarter, but people letting tens or hundreds of agents just rip... I can't imagine doing it.
For personal throwaway projects that you do because you want to reach the end output (as opposed to learning or caring), sure, do it, you verify it works roughly, and be done with it.
This is my problem with the whole "can LLMs code?" discussion. Obviously, LLMs can produce code, well even, much like a champion golfer can get a hole in one. But can they code in the sense of "the pilot can fly the plane", i.e. barring a catastrophic mechanical malfunction or a once-in-a-decade weather phenomennon, the pilot will get the plane to its destination safely? I don't think so.
To me, someone who can code means someone who (unless they're in a detectable state of drunkenness, fatigue, illness, or distraction) will successfully complete a coding task commensurate with some level of experience or, at the very least, explain why exactly the task is proving difficult. While I've seen coding agents do things that truly amaze me, they also make mistakes that no one who "can code" ever makes. If you can't trust an LLM to complete a task anyone who can code will either complete or explain their failure, then it can't code, even if it can (in the sense of "a flipped coin can come up heads") sometimes emit impressive code.
I mean you'd think. But it depends on the motivations.
At meta, we had league tables for reviewing code. Even then people only really looked at it if a) they were a nitpicking shit b) don't like you and wanted piss on your chips c) its another team trying to fix our shit.
With the internal claude rollout and the drive to vibe code all the things, I'm not sure that situation has got any better. Fortunately its not my problem anymore
Well, it certainly depends on the culture of the team and organization.
Where you have shared ownership, meaning once I approved your PR, I am just as responsible of something goes wrong as you are and I can be expected to understand it just as well as you do… your code will get reviewed.
If shipping is the number one priority of the team, and a team is really just a group of individuals working to meet their quota, and everyone wants to simply ship their stuff, managers pressure managers to constantly put pressure on the devs, you’ll get your PR rubber stamped after 20s of review. Why would I spend hours trying to understand what you did if I could work on my stuff.
And yes, these tools make this 100x worse, people don’t understand their fixes, code standards are no longer relevant, and you are expected to ship 10x faster, so it’s all just slop from here on.
It is hard to look at where it is going when there are so many lies about where the tech is today. There are extraordinary claims made on Twitter all the time about the technology, but when you look into things, it’s all just smoke and mirrors, the claims misrepresent the reality.
It’s not a free and open source issue, it’s a general issue in product development.
Whereas in free software, people develop apps to have fun, in business product development, teams always try to ship a feature that is the highest leverage, and making the app work well with screen readers is usually not the highest leverage item, unfortunately.
I’m reading the comments almost every day, and I write them only if I think I have a point, insight that the other 50 people in the comments didn’t have.
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