I’ve found that the quality of code produced by my team has dropped significantly since my org pushed everyone to use LLMs. “Let me throw an agent at it” usually means “here’s another headache of a PR for me to review.” Engineers with decades of experience are writing such utter fucking crap now, and it doesn’t matter how many docs I write for their fuckass agents to ingest, the quality doesn’t seem to be getting better. They can make their agent loop on it for functionality/bug and hallucination squashing, but that usually just means I get a bloated fucking mess to review. It’s miserable and it makes me want to go shovel actual hog shit.
Sincerely,
a very sad and tired senior dev who used to enjoy his job
As a senior dev… AI actually improved the code we wrote in my last job. Mind you the codebase was in a shite position (tons of technical debt, plague-like avoidance of inline comments because “all of that knowledge is on Jira/Notion” except it wasn’t; lots of legacy code, undocumented weird behaviours, everyone was doing their own coding style without regards to the rest of the codebase and so on).
With controlled AI contributions, we’ve managed to:
refactor large chunks of code where the overall high level logic didn’t need to change, but the underlying tooling did (e.g. lots of UI layers got rewritten from a very early attempt at a standardised MVVM approach to a well defined MVI one, we’ve also managed to eliminate the remaining RxJava/RxKotlin legacy flows to replace them with Coroutines)
UI layers got refactored in no time because the AI agent was able to convert them appropriately (and even fixed a handful of UI bugs)
a handful of core monoliths (yes I know… I hated working with them as well, but we never had the chance to properly refactor) got split up into more manageable, vertical-specific domain controllers without breaking
the elimination of a legacy overarching component that was estimated at 6 months, got reduced to 6 weeks
unit test coverage skyrocketed because even if the code was hand-written, an agent would provide coverage, based not just on implementation but on intention (and adoption of TDD/BDD finally started spreading).
Meanwhile code quality improved because we’ve had well established patterns and styles defined in the agent instructions, and even the anti-documentation “pragmatists” got shut up when they finally understood that the AI works better if there’s fucking comments to explain what’s going on
What you’ve done is allowed an unethical and incompetent machine create an unmaintainable technical debt which will destroy the future of the codebase or the company, because you were all lazy.
Being “good with it” doesn’t negate the overwhelming harms it causes. Those harms are part of the slop: environmental slop, work environment slop, societal degradation slop.
Electricity allows us to perform otherwise impossible logistics, medical care, heating, countless beneficial technologies, and longer operation hours in industry.
Without AI… what? More jobs, cheaper utilities, lower polution? In the future it might be able to lie to you sightly more efficiently while funneling control of industry into the hands of a dozen wealthy elites.
Way too many people just equate any form of LLM/agentic/AI with pure slop.
As a tech lead who has to review a lot of code: those who did shit without LLM do shit with it. Those who are good without, are good with it.
I’ve found that the quality of code produced by my team has dropped significantly since my org pushed everyone to use LLMs. “Let me throw an agent at it” usually means “here’s another headache of a PR for me to review.” Engineers with decades of experience are writing such utter fucking crap now, and it doesn’t matter how many docs I write for their fuckass agents to ingest, the quality doesn’t seem to be getting better. They can make their agent loop on it for functionality/bug and hallucination squashing, but that usually just means I get a bloated fucking mess to review. It’s miserable and it makes me want to go shovel actual hog shit.
Sincerely,
a very sad and tired senior dev who used to enjoy his job
If they push shit, I push back. It’s a tool they can use, not an excuse. Creating rules for the agent is fine, but that’s only a soft guardrail.
We don’t have a mandate to use LLMs, if things are worse with them then we won’t use them.
That’s the mindset we started with but things have shifted to what we’re seeing now and people are being forced to use it in many cases.
As a senior dev… AI actually improved the code we wrote in my last job. Mind you the codebase was in a shite position (tons of technical debt, plague-like avoidance of inline comments because “all of that knowledge is on Jira/Notion” except it wasn’t; lots of legacy code, undocumented weird behaviours, everyone was doing their own coding style without regards to the rest of the codebase and so on).
With controlled AI contributions, we’ve managed to:
Meanwhile code quality improved because we’ve had well established patterns and styles defined in the agent instructions, and even the anti-documentation “pragmatists” got shut up when they finally understood that the AI works better if there’s fucking comments to explain what’s going on
What you’ve done is allowed an unethical and incompetent machine create an unmaintainable technical debt which will destroy the future of the codebase or the company, because you were all lazy.
It sounds more like you didn’t even read his comment and are just rabidly spewing anti-AI talking points instead of participating in the discussion.
Chill out dude
Please shut the fuck up if you have no inkling about what you’re talking about.
Being “
good with it” doesn’t negate the overwhelming harms it causes. Those harms are part of the slop: environmental slop, work environment slop, societal degradation slop.Didn’t say “good with it”, I said "being good*.
5 years ago the complaint was people copy pasting from stack overflow without care. Those people now push without care.
Oh, sorry for misquoting you. It wanst intentional. I get you now.
We’re harmmaxxing!
Throwing around the word slop just devalues it.
Slop has a meaning and it does NOT equal harm.
The invention of electricity also did a tremendous amount of harm. Should we have also just tried to put it back in its box?
Electricity allows us to perform otherwise impossible logistics, medical care, heating, countless beneficial technologies, and longer operation hours in industry.
Without AI… what? More jobs, cheaper utilities, lower polution? In the future it might be able to lie to you sightly more efficiently while funneling control of industry into the hands of a dozen wealthy elites.
None of that was true when it was first invented, it killed many people caused house fires etc.
We don’t know yet all the uses of AI, but we’re going to find out despite how many people on the fediverse crash out at the mention of AI