I like them. It tells very clearly how much effort went into someone's work.

I like them even more on code comments. It tells _precisely_ how much effort went into the pull request, so I don't spend time reviewing lazy work.

It does not at all indicate the effort that went into doing the thing. Clearly not.

I propose that what you enjoy is having a token of the appearance of effort, easily constructed and easily observed and easily suitable for low-effort handling of these proxy objects for actual work.

I think you’re missing the sarcasm in their comment.

They’re saying that the emoji usage is telling them that very little effort was put into the PR and that they’ll treat it accordingly.

Haha! Thanks!!!

My apologies!, sincerely.

(If only the message I was responding to had had emojis and checkmarks for me to efficiently process it!!!!)

So you just rubber-stamp the lazy work? What else can you do when this PR is assigned to you specifically for reviewing?

Recently I reviewed some vibe-coded stuff and sent a list of issues and suggestions to the “author,” figuring he’d read it and then go through each one with Claude until fixed.

Instead he didn’t read it at all, and just threw the whole thing at Claude Code as a big prompt. The result was… interesting!

This is happening with coworkers now. It’s honestly insulting.

They put up a PR with all the obvious tells, the markdown table of files that changed, the description that basically parrots back things the human obviously wanted them to stress in the task (“this implements a secure, tested (no regressions) implementation of a Foo…”), and the code is an absolute mess of one-off functions placed in any random file with no thought to the way the codebase is actually organized.

Then I give feedback after spending like an hour going through their 2000 line change, and then here comes back an update with a very literal interpretation of my feedback that clearly doesn’t really understand what I was even saying. Complete with code comments that parrot back what I said (“// Use the expected platform abstractions for conversion (not bespoke methods”).

Reviewing coworkers PR’s feels like I’m just talking to the LLM directly at this point, but with more steps and I have less control over the output.

The last place I worked for, if it happened with someone new in the company or the team, I would find a polite way to say "do your job and fix this shit" and it worked.

Some people have put me on their blacklists after these interactions, sure, but they're the exact people I don't want to work with again. The important thing here is that I've never done someone else's work for free.

I guess they just close the PR.

You tell Claude to review it and if it breaks something you blame Claude. No one can get mad at you for it because they don't want to look like luddites.

I wonder if we humans are already checking out from PR reviews from human effort that we've misjudged as AI. we are in so much trouble! lol

Because the reviewer ends up doing the real work actually checking it works.

The laziness is offloading work down the line.

That has nothing to do with using AI, if the dev didn't check their work then that is being a bad dev.

That’s what this whole thread is about. Appearances of productivity, laziness, and the offloading of real work downstream by sending of “looks good enough” ai generated work.

LLMs can't fail, they can only be failed ... by you!

Hence OpenAI sinking $4b into "The Deployment Company", to pump up the number of Very Helpful Consultants which can offer to help your company overcome is tragic failure to adopt and buy, for a small fee...

As fallible as they may be, I've never had a next-thought generator recommend me glue as a pizza ingredient.

No big brother or big sister?

Are you making the pizza for eating or for menu photography? I seem to recall glue being used in menu photography ‘food’ a lot.

You must not have kids

> execs being misinformed about what their own companies are doing/achieving with AI

And a bunch of yes-men down the lower layers of management funneling these ideas.

In a meeting at my last job, one of the execs was bragging about how a chatbot was reading Jira customer service tickets and calling tools/APIs to solve those tickets, and it "only costs 1.5USD per ticket. How much would a human cost, huh?"

Little did the exec know, but my team was already using a ~600 lines python script to solve the problem with a higher rate of precision. The chatbot-automation thing was largely pushed by my manager when I was out on vacation, just so he could earn his good-boy points with higher ups. Worst manager I've had in my 14 years of career btw.

Funny thing. This never happened to me with tech/electronics, but happens from time to time with food items.

Fine doublespeak there. It can mean anything when talking to the public, and anything else when talking to Sam Altman.

And on that same sentence:

> but in today’s world but in today’s world where the world changes every month, it’s best to be ahead.

Could I be the one getting ahead of him if I skip next month and plan for <next month>+1 world changes?

Damn, if the future is so uncertain that it changes at every month, maybe I don't even want to be ahead!

I would want to use the anxious low ranking pioneers as scouts that face all the risks while I have more freedom to change course once the winds are more favorable.

One of the smartest people for whom I ever worked was fond of saying about such situations that “you almost never want to be the first one up the beach.” I saw him get that right over and over again.

Goes to show how infested with disconnected management this industry is.

All the tools that improved productivity for software devs (Docker, K8S/ECS/autoscaling, Telemetry providers) took very long for management to realize they bring value, and in some places with a lot of resistance. Some places where I worked, asking for an IntelliJ license would make your manager look at you like you were asking "hey can I bang your wife?".

Yes—it is!

Sorry for not contributing to the discussion (as per the guidelines), but is it just me or this blog post reads a lot like LLM-filled mumble jumble? Seems like I could trim half of the words there and nothing would be lost.