alt Hacker NewsBeyond 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?
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For me the trick was just leaning all the way into it. I had a residual idea that if someone sends me a 2000 line PR, 10 page design, etc., that this represents some concrete investment of time and effort that deserves my careful consideration. And it just doesn't anymore.
I have one project where there must be hundreds of pages of design proposals I have not read and will never read, because the author really likes having Claude generate complete design proposals based on incomplete understanding. So every week or two he sends me a new one, I spend 30 seconds skimming it, and then I tab back to Slack to ask him to explain.
I don't like working this way, but you know, I don't like doing rollouts either. It's certainly better than being a human rubberstamp.
I tried to get our team to enforce a max PR size.
It worked for a while. There is a GitHub action that you can configure to fail if the PR is too large.
But then we started a new project and I didn’t add it right away since it’s a small team and I figured we could use the honor system.
Since then there have been lots of massive PRs but there’s not much willingness to go back to enforcing the rule because it might slow us down…
It’s frustrating.