alt Hacker NewsA very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at.
This single headline perfectly captures what I have been thinking. It's not that I reject AI content, but it takes _effort_ to review and weed out any mistakes. When your thoughtful reviews that take an hour(because the PR is typically large, and you want to be _right_ when you're pointing out a hallucination) gets an AI-generated response with AI-generated amendments, It doesn't feel _nice_. I feel dismissed and it has continuously trained me to subconsciously avoid his PRs. After all, the team is fully onboarded with AI, so it's not like there is a lack of PRs to review.
It looks like the sentiment isn't just isolated for me.
Replies
It sounds like one potential interpretation of his behavior is that he values his own time more than your time.
I wonder if that's occurred to him.
Have you spoken to him about this? If he's clueless enough to send AI responses to human messages, he's probably clueless enough to not realise why people don't do that.
I like this rule of thumb: Spend more effort producing the work than it takes for someone else to consume it.
It's not always feasible of course but I think there is real, worthwhile discipline in trying to get change requests small and it matters more with agents. It's very easy to let it balloon into gazillions of files and lines.
Fight fire with fire. Ask Fable to conduct an adversarial /ultareview of their PR and send the same wall of text back to them. If there are excessive defects, ask them in standup if they actually reviewed the PR themselves before sending it. If there aren’t maybe they are on to something. I think like in law, the human submitting the work is responsible for its quality, not the AI.
why leave comments intended for your human colleague when they will only forward them to the bot?
why not speak directly to the bot yourself instead? then you can drop pretenses and get to the point
I find this to be a new variant of the old behavior where a colleague comments on a typo in a PR, and the team later moans about laborious back and forth for small nitpicks, instead of simply editing the typo right there (and perhaps leaving a note that they did so)
why not just approve the PRs with little more than a cursory glance?
One of two things will happen:
1. Things start breaking, proving AI generated code sucks and the individual spamming these PRs is incompetent.
2. The code works fine and reviews are unnecessary for anything other than liability concerns.
just fire him lol sounds like a nightmare
In big software teams, the bottleneck is team communication. I've run big and small teams. If I want to speed things up, I remove people from the team. Everything gets easier. This has worked amazingly well every time I've done this over the past decades. Removing people doesn't have to mean firing them necessarily. Splitting teams is a good reflex. But of course the people you remove from a team are typically not the best performers. I was discussing this with a friend of mine who runs a small company. Exact same thing. He reduced the team size by 1 and the velocity went up almost instantly. This person was a bottleneck in the team and was slowing down people around him. After identifying the problem, solving it unblocked the rest of the team.
This was true long before AI. With AI the difference is just a lot bigger. It exposes team inefficiencies quite mercilessly. We have a big glaring issue with the current AI tools not being to suitable for usage by multiple users. All interactions are one on one. Which means hand offs between tools and people are bottle necked on people communicating with each other. So, any issues there with people delaying, gate keeping, etc. become very visible.
The sentiment of pushing back on AI is understandable but probably not a productive reflex. We need to find more effective ways on staying on top of massive amounts of changes. It's not going to slow down and insisting on manually reviewing all code is not going to be a long term sustainable way of developing software. It simply does not scale. I'd question the added value of manual PR reviews at this point. Are they finding real issues? Are we valuing those issues correctly? Could we come up with automated ways to find and fix those same issues? There are a lot of open questions about how we are going to do this. But no question about the notion that we need to up our game on this front.