alt Hacker NewsYou will be surprised by how many professional software engineers don't read their code or care these days.
I have seen a bubble sort function in a PR from an engineer with 10 years of experience. Meanwhile sort from standard library is easily available with one single line.
The bar has become as low as "it works" without considering what's in the code or whether the entire feature should even exist at all.
P.S. that same engineer sent out a PR of 200-file feature. The PR is so large that it freezes the latest MacBook Pro if you try to read it. Nobody reviewed it and he merged it himself. Nobody uses that feature, and nobody in the teams wants to maintain it. Now we are considering scrapping it.
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It’s so easy to generate a pile of crap now that it “just works” as you say.
Quality, maintainability, simplicity, understandability, flexibility etc all still matter at $DAY_JOB, where you’ve got paying customers. We’ve got a responsibility to write good software that adds to people’s lives.
I’d recommend to try to raise the bar. Commit messages written by humans, no PRs above a certain size, any PR needs an introduction / explanation by author first for the reviewers.
This is not overly surprising to me, the last decade or so has seen the industry become a "good job that pays well" and many people got into not for the love and craft, but for the money
I refuse to believe an LLM implemented bubble sort without being prompted.
Had AI do some work parsing markdown with the leading library for it.
Follow up work to generate markdown? It wrote a mess of manual string building instead of using said library lol. Even with strong AGENTS.md guidance around using existing and leading community libraries they will often take a hard left and write stdlib straight into your repo.
Y'all should scrap that feature and maybe the engineer. I believe the Shopify CEO recently referred to those types of PR as "slop grenades" that cause headaches for everyone else..
This kind of thing is awful if this is how engineering is going for user-facing apps, but disastrous if this is how it's going for infrastructure and libraries.
"professional software engineers don't read their code or care these days"
The word professional im important here. I don't want to know, how unprofessional devs handle their craft.
It's interesting your complaints are similar to mine about TDD. I've dealt with so many engineers that assume that coverage and passing tests is the bar.
Most engineers aren’t really idiots.
When you get paid to care, you will care. Unfortunately, no one cares, they just want results, any result. Bubble sort will do, especially for low volume tasks.
Use the time you save by not caring, to do other fun stuff.
The thing is: people quickly discover that even mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review, is still better quality than what they hand wrote and hand-reviewed.
So it's already an improvement. Should it be manually read, comprehended, reviewed? Probably. But they can get to an improvement over what they did 2 years ago, with basically no effort. And then they can get a little bit further, with massive effort?
The "LLM-yolo" is a big knee in the cost/benefit curve. It's an improvement over their "old code". The only drawback is: it's still containing bugs, and now no one understands them. But that's not hitting them until that code has aged somewhat, so a year or two down the line.