I am still not sure why would you blame AI for that. I mean, all right, there are, so what? Why The Mad Printer is an issue? Are you obliged to merge all that? Who, after all, told this restless machinery to provide PRs?
mudasobwa
Creator of Cure
yoavgeva
I understand what you are saying, but it sound not realistic, for you it might work for 99% of developers it won’t, it’s not so easy to just replace a job, each person have his own reason to stay, some are bad in interviews, some don’t want to move their family, some don’t want to lose their friends in work. I understand what you say, but most of the companies, place money over quality, there are some places (really few) who take quality as top important in building the product. about OSS I agree.
mudasobwa
Creator of Cure
yoavgeva
it’s more like you push code quality when it’s possible and you try keep it that way as much as possible, but it’s not 100%, it usually about 50%-80% depend on the stress to release the feature, it’s about real life, I am not aware of one product where you can say 100% is code quality, this is subjective subject as well.
dimitarvp
As you were already told – many cannot afford that. I absolutely will find a job if my current one rubs me the wrong way. But whether it’ll take 3 months or 9 months does make a difference.
Perspectives from a privileged point of view are boring. I say let’s discuss AI and its impact because that line of arguing – “find a better job” – never goes anywhere.
Speaking of which: currently the job market is crazy. Everyone expects you to suddenly be 5x - 10x faster. Insane. That makes people stay where they are because it looks kind of terrible out there.
As usual – people with network and connections are ahead. The rest: good luck in the jungle.
mudasobwa
Creator of Cure
I answered the question you asked me personally. I gave the very personal answer. This is by no means “a perspectives from a privileged point of view.”
I don’t think everyone is applicable here. Yes, there are many who does. But asking “how are engineering leads to stop the slop” and rejecting answers “tighten the CRs, credo rules and linters, and quit, if we are not treated as engineering leeds anymore” is not fair. Why do you think my library oeditus_credo with 40 additional credo checks happened to appear a month ago, and not a year ago, huh?
thomasbrus
As an engineering lead, I think it is fair to push back on PRs with thousands of difficult to review lines of code.
It’s the job of the PR author to explain their changes. This will lead to better code, more ownership and a better understanding of the code they produced.
80-90% of the effort should lie with the author, the rest with the reviewer. With AI slop this effort is being shifted to the reviewer and that is a problem imho.
mudasobwa
Creator of Cure
Sure. It has been that way 20 years ago, it will be [hopefully] that way 20 years after. AI slop has nothing to do with that.
dimitarvp
We can reframe it as an anecdotal evidence then.
That I agree with, thank you. To me it seems this thread is more about “how do you mitigate the inevitable slop as an engineering lead” because the original thread title becomes a bit of a fantasy – engineering leads cannot stop the slop. The power asymmetry is hugely tilted in the favor of the C-suites (as it always was) and even if you can say “no” 10-15 times, at one point you are viewed as the bottleneck and people either start working around you and smuggle the slop without your approval, or somebody from up above calls you up to tell you to “work with the new realities”.
As @tfwright mentioned – political capital is difficult to gain and very easy to spend.
I understood why the moment I was halfway through your intro thread. I wanted to do something similar for years – so now I will very likely use your thing. I found that LLMs can still be made very useful if one gives them much stricter framework to work in.
yoavgeva
agree AI slop not relevent, it’s just the job of the team Reviewer and committer to make sure the slop won’t effect the code, it hasn’t change after the AI