alt Hacker NewsAs much as I like Claude Code, Boris has done a lot of harm by encouraging software engineering practices that lead to slopware. We have two camps of people at work, the first camp are the agent goes brrr. They don't understand the code they write. They have loops running, agent orchestrators or agent hype du jour. The second camp is people who are inundated with PRs, are holding the line on quality, and just exhausted. We've also had some management pressures where they think people are wasting time looking at code. Perhaps because some podcast they might be listening to, somebody says coding is largely solved.
> I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops.
This is going to be a net negative on software quality for people who take this up, in my opinion.
I call out Boris but I also don't think he's being malicious. He's at the center of an important technological revolution and it would be hard not to get excited. I just wished he advocated for a more balanced and a realistic perspective.
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> We've also had some management pressures where they think people are wasting time looking at code.
I feel like this is the actual problem, but it's not being talked about enough.
Logically, it shouldn't matter how a piece of code was written. It either meets our engineering standards or it doesn't. That's what code review is for.
But what has actually happened is that, because we have AI now, many organizations have normalized practices that weren't normal before, like submitting 10000-line PRs. And just, in general, submitting code that you yourself don't seem to fully understand.
If management doesn't push back on such things (or will even push back against people who try to do so), then reviewers have basically no incentive to push back either. Before I left my last job (for unrelated reasons), I had entered this mode, wherein I decided I couldn't really carefully review these monstrous AI PRs, while also getting my own work done, while also not burning out. So I chose the latter two.
Reading through the thread, it's striking how many people are feeling the same mix of excitement and exhaustion you describe. I'm in that camp too... the tools are incredible, but the pace and expectations around them can feel overwhelming.
I fully agree with what you say regarding Boris, but I would emphasize that I don't think he has malicious intention either. He still is doing his job, to showcase the features their product offers.
> We have two camps of people at work
I don't like the framing of this, but I suppose it's inevitable given how every other political issue has been framed to date.
There are many camps in between the two being described. There are those who use maybe $20 worth of unsubsidized tokens per month to accelerate their work. Full-time human in the loop, every LOC still reviewed by hand. Also, the developer who still does copy-paste in and out of ChatGPT. Those tribes exist too and are way more typical than these extremes.
I have given up on spending more time reviewing PRs and help fixing bad decisions made by AI because all it does is encouraging the same thing without learning. Next PR will most likely contain similar design / code problems.
I can't speak for all orgs but at the end of the day, the only metric that my org cares about is how AI is improving our work. Holding the line for quality is definitely a good thing, but when your org doesn't care about the pressure on PR reviewers, and the effort it took to fix those PR mistakes or their repeat, those reviews are only helping the loop case and that AI is without flaws. I am not saying AI is a bad thing all together, but when the org ignores those metrics, I am only contributing and helping to prove that the other side is right.
Yes, I am exhausted. Most of my company is obsessed with agents, because everyone wants to be seen as AI first. There is little thought going into usage. No care for long term maintainability and quality. Our product is actively worse by many metrics, but no one cares because we marketing can say “agents”.
The sad part is that this technology is incredible. It’s us choosing to turn it into a slop cannon (and the labs sure seem to encourage this).
I want to leave the industry as soon as I can.
> I call out Boris but I also don't think he's being malicious.
From a market perspective, he's acting completely rationally in his own interests. Bottom line is that these companies need to do whatever they can to keep growing token consumption because that's their goal.
If the nation's drinking skyrocketed, we wouldn't be sitting here wondering why the CEO of Budweiser isn't advocating for temperance. His job is to move kegs, just like Boris' job is to move tokens.
As long as the LLM can unravel, repair, and improve the slopware it creates, that's where we are necessarily going. The code will continue to be maintainable, by the LLM. I'm used to this idea and I for one welcome...
> This is going to be a net negative on software quality for people who take this up, in my opinion.
The silver lining appears to be that long term most people won't be able to afford producing slop at current rates.
Like Mario tried to do... But no one listened
I think at the end of this we'll have a new software engineering paradigm.
Mostly nobody now worry about binaries or instructions because those are for the compilers, even undefined behavior are mostly ignored.
You can either tailor the development pattern for LLM, or have LLM come write for the same old development pattern. I think there is going to be a difference.
This sums up the dynamic: https://x.com/danhockenmaier/status/2021617680525172840