I am currently going through this with someone in our organization.

Unfortunately, this person is vibe coding completely, and even the PR process is painful: * The coding agent reverts previously applied feedback * Coding agent not following standards throughout the code base * Coding agent re-inventing solutions that already exist * PR feedback is being responded to with agent output * 50k line PRs that required a 10-20 line change * Lack of testing (though there are some automated tests, but their validations are slim/lacking) * Bad error handling/flow handling

I'm seeing a little bit of this. However, I will add that the primary culprits are engineers that were submitting low quality PRs before they had access to LLMs, they can just submit them faster now.

Voila:

https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-android/pull/82 https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-android/pull/80

In that first one, the double pasted AI retort in the last comment is pretty wild. In both of these, look at the actual "files changed" tab for the wtf.

A friend of mine is working for a small-ish startup (11 people) and he gets to work and sees the CTO push 10k loc changes straight to main at 3 am.

Probs fine when you are still in the exploration phase of a startup, scary once you get to some kind of stability

A friend of mine has a junior engineer who does this and then responds to questions like "Why did you do X?" with "I didn't, Claude did, I don't know why".

Yep. Remember, people not posting on this website are just grinding away at jobs where their individual output does not matter, and entire motivation is work JUST hard enough not to get fired. They don't get stock grants, extremely favorable stock options or anything else, they get salary and MAYBE a small bonus based off business factors they have little control over.

My eyes were wide open when 2 jobs ago, they said they would be blocking all personal web browsing from work computers. Multiple Software Devs were unhappy because they were using their work laptop for booking flights, dealing with their kids schools stuff and other personal things. They did not have personal computer at all.

I don't see most PRs because they happen in other teams, but I am part of Slack channel where there are too many "oops" messages for my liking.

I.e. 1-2 times a month, there's an SQL script posted that will be run against prod to "hopefully fix data for all customers who were put into a bad state from a previous code release".

The person who posts this type of message most often is also the one running internal demos of the latest AI flows and trying to get everyone else onboard.

I thought we were not, but we had just been lucky. A sequence of events lately have shown that the struggle is real. This was not a junior developer though, but an experienced one. Experience does not equal skill, evidently.

Definitely seeing a bit of this, but it isn't constrained to junior devs. It's also pretty solvable by explaining to the person why it's not great, and just updating team norms.

i left my last job because this was endemic

I'm seeing it on some open source projects I maintain. Recently had 10 or so PRs come in. All very valid features - but from looking at them, not actually tested.

Quite a few FOSS maintainers have been speaking up about it.

Not at all. Submitting untested PRs is a wildly outside of my experience. Having tests written to cover your code is a pre-requisite for having your PR reviewed on our team. "Does it work" aka passing manual testing, is literally the bare minimum before submitting a PR

It isn't only junior engineers, but otherwise. It is a small number of people from all levels.

People do what they think they will be rewarded for. When you think your job is to write a lot of code then LLMs are great. When you need quality code you start to ask if LLMs are better or not?

I started seeing it from a particularly poor developer sometime last year. I was the only reviewer for him so I saw all of his PRs. He refused to stop despite my polite and then not so polite admonishments, and was soon fired for it.

I’ve been seeing obviously LLM generated PRs, but not huge ones.

Not so much the huge PRs, but definitely the LLM generated code that the “developer” doesn’t understand.

I'm not either

But LLMs don't really perform well enough on our codebase to allow you to generate things that even appear to work. And I'm the most junior member of my team at 37 years of age, hired in 2019.

I really tried to follow the mandate from on high to use Copilot, but the Agent mode can't even write code that compiles with the tools available to it.

Luckily I hooked it up to gptel so I can at least ask it quick questions about big functions I don't want to read in emacs.

Yes, in the only successful OSS project that I “maintain.”

Fully vibe coded, which at least they admitted. And when I pointed out the thing is off by an order of magnitude, and as such doesn't implement said feature — at all — we get pressed on our AI policy, so as to not waste their time.

I don't have an AI policy, like I don't have an IDE policy, but things get ridiculous fast with vibe coding.

I feel like a story about some open-source project getting (and rejecting) mammoth-sized PRs hits HN every week!

Similar, at my last job. And the pushback was greater because super duper clever AI helped write it, who obviously knows more than any other senior engineer could know, so they were expecting an immediate PR approval and got all uppity when you tried to suggest changes.

first time we’d see this there would be a warning, second one is pink slip

It's been a struggle with a few teammates that we are trying to solve through explicit policy, feedback, and ultimately management action.

It's not a new phenomenon. Time was, people would copy-paste from blog posts with the same effect.