alt Hacker NewsThis drives me absolutely crazy. My colleagues send me huge PRs to review (say 2000+ lines). I don't just paste comments from the LLM, I ask the LLM to review it, but I also review it myself. I only include ideas from the LLM if I think a) the LLM has gotten the issue right and b) it's worth having the developer take the time to address the issue. I always write the comment myself so I can add relevant context and put it in my own voice.
Then, after I've put in all this work, the developer just replies with a copy-paste of what the LLM thinks about my comment. I have no idea if the developer read or understood my point. I have no idea if he agrees or not. It doesn't just seem disrespectful to the effort I put into the review, it also leaves me in a difficult position as a tech lead because I have no idea if the person who is ultimately responsible for this code understands the code, my feedback on the code, or the changes that the LLM made to address my feedback. If you're responsible for a feature, I want to be able to feel like you're thinking critically about how that feature works. Right now, I just feel like you're blindly doing everything that I tell you. It also feels like I'm shouting into the void. We're colleagues, we should be able to have a conversation about technical subjects!
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Yeah, I don't love this part of the work. Especially since it's completely exploded out the text of basically everything. I'm also suspicious that the person that generated that text didn't read any of it.
How do ya feel about altercations at work? If like most, then hope your colleagues find your post & decide to stop (without realizing you’re their lead!).
What's even worse is when you go though such PRs and your comments are handled in minutes, with replies explaining the change with perfect spelling and em dashes. At which point you ask yourself: "What am I doing here? His agent wrote the entire thing, and now I'm going through it and telling his agent what to fix. Why is he even needed?"
Or even, even worse is when you get a PR from a co-worker, you spend a lot of time explaining why that's bad idea, only for the person to say "Sorry, my openclaw/etc posted that. I'll close it." Or even the opposite, you tell a co-worker: "Hey, it was a great idea to change X." and he says "X? What is X?... Oh that must have been my agent."
Beyond mirroring the engineering practices that you yourself want to see other people perform, have you found any techniques to get people to … in short, do their job again? Understand context, understand what they did, why they did it, what they’re doing, etc.
The +/-2000 line MR was bad when humans wrote it. It’s way worse when the human didn’t even write or read it.
And just vomiting automated CodeRabbit talking points back and forth at each other feels equally harmful.
Are we really tolerating turning ourselves into LLM rubber stamps?