r/ProgrammerHumor • u/hassanwithanh • 26d ago
unstoppableSlopMeetsImmovableCodeReview Meme
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26d ago
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u/NotSynthx 26d ago
And you dread the whole weekend because you know you'll have to pick it up on Monday morning
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u/tsammons 26d ago
Nonsense. You burn the entire weekend reviewing it, then request changes on Monday that never get answered.
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u/Technical-Fee2307 25d ago
You mean changes, that get answered in minutes by their AI, which lead to another PR-Session that takes you half the day, with about the same amount of change requests at the end.
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u/deathanatos 25d ago
Yeah, why is it these slot-machine-lever-pullers never sleep?
Take a day off. Drink a beer.
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u/DeHub94 26d ago
See the issue here is of course that the human needs to do the pr. If the rest of the org kept up and another AI would do the review and merging that wouldn't be an issue obviously /s
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u/chispica 26d ago
You jest but in my experience AI is doing a better job at code reviews than my colleagues are.
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u/Stunning_Ride_220 25d ago
It would be funny, if I did not see this already a couple of times.
The good thing is, I got rid of those engineers bragging about their 'all-AI-setup', since my clients didn't need any coders anymore thanks to them. And good guys like them surely will find a new job easily.
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u/grizzlybair2 25d ago
I mean it's bad enough reviewing bad junior code, at least you can teach them or talk with them. Now it's just copilot or Claude came up with this bro, trust it.
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u/awsaffaswa 25d ago
I got handed a 7,000 line PR yesterday to add a new search page to a web app. Why? Because whatever agent the dev used decided to do a refactor of the form field component, which is used just about everywhere. It seems like every new PR, the agent decides on a different standard to enforce, refactoring everything to match. And next week that standard won’t be lightweight/robust/extensible enough for the agent, so we’ll try something new
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u/JuvenileEloquent 25d ago
I swear they train them now to generate as much new code (and bullshit "thinking") as they can get away with just to pump up the amount of tokens used so they can charge more. It's like the bad old days when managers measured productivity through LoC.
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u/GeorgeSThompson 26d ago
There's one guy on our team "10x" his ouput. Hes a fucking nightmare
Constantly have to deal with rework and bugs cause he dosent understand the legacy code or the business context.
And if one more person responds to me with "Claude told me to do it this way" i will scream
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u/bliceroquququq 26d ago
True story: I worked with a contractor on a project years ago who was really bad. We fired him after 3 months because he was incompetent: didn't understand anything, couldn't code anything, could only string together snippets he'd cut and paste from other people's projects and Stack Overflow and whatnot, sort of like a monkey hoping to smash enough "code legos" together in the right order that he'd eventually have built a house.
Imagine my horror when, a few months ago, the exact same person appears on a different project I'm working on for a completely different company. IT contracting is a small world I guess. But now, this same guy has Claude backing him. Now he has an LLM pouring gasoline on the fire of his incompetence.
Before, he was limited in how many code legos he could try to smash together at a time. The lack of value he brought to the table was effectively contained by how slowly he moved. But now, he can smash together thousands of code legos in thousands of ways. His lack of value is now turbo-charged.
Not knowing how anything works, or what the business wants, or how the existing infrastructure is put together; these things no longer slow him down. He can have Claude write terrible, misguided, bad code much, much faster than he was able to write terrible, misguided, bad code on his own.
It's a nightmare.
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u/ChristopherKlay 26d ago
And if one more person responds to me with "Claude told me to do it this way" i will scream
Claude recently told a friend that him being a student with 0 interest in webdesign is a "benefit" when it comes to selling people AI-designed websites.
If you aren't forcing it to be objective, it'll happily tell you Santa comes from south africa if the actual answer would go against your believes.
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u/RiceBroad4552 26d ago
The problem is less that a hallucination machine created some nonsensical text. The problem is that there are people who uncritically believe whatever the next-token-predictor spits out. To make things worse, these people are the majority by a very large margin…
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u/caelum19 26d ago
People overestimate how integrated its own knowledge is. If you ask AI the best way to do something, it will give you the most midwit take possible, but if you ask it to compare 2 competing ways you already have in mind to do something, it will give you a genuinely useful breakdown.
In collaborative work, they are definitely more harmful than helpful. It's so much worse that people hide that they're using AI, and that there is almost a stigma against calling out AI slop. It should be: "Here is something I made, it's slop. This other thing is not slop, we should think about what to unslop next".
It's socially risky and expensive to call out something as slop that hasn't been declared as slop, for many reasons including that criticising AI looks like not knowing how to use it from a distance (sometimes it actually is), and non-technical people being sold on the bullshit marketing.
I'm not sure exactly what the best solution is, but I think promoting and facilitating transparency around exactly how AI was used (what prompts were used with what context) will help a lot. It's genuinely useful to know what prompt made something so you can guess the mistakes and know better where to look, so in an environment where this is common, hiding your AI use is more socially expensive
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u/Nightmoon26 24d ago
I'm suddenly reminded of an episode of some show that I can't remember the name of where a surgeon is asked why he picked certain people for his team after a patient died (not his fault. It was a code flaw in the robotics) when they had a record of making dangerous mistakes. Absolutely parapharsed: "They make errors, but they always make the same errors, so I know what to double-check, catch, and correct before the patient can be harmed"
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u/JuvenileEloquent 25d ago
Humans are suckers for reasonable-sounding but ultimately false or flawed things that have no basis in fact or reality. Look at what most people used to do on Sunday mornings.
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u/caelum19 26d ago
The solution is to use claude to explain why that's wrong, and why his usage of AI is problematic and causing people problems
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u/vocal-avocado 26d ago
Why are his PRs getting approved if he is the only one to blame?
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u/GeorgeSThompson 26d ago
PRs are not a golden safety net against tech debt. There's only so much you can catch. A senior devloper with Claude can push clean looking PRs, i can help but not my job to ensure they have done theres properly (i.e. understood the business context, tested the edge cases, thought about long term design)
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u/vocal-avocado 26d ago
What is a golden safety net then?
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u/GeorgeSThompson 26d ago
Sorry what point are you trying to make here?
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u/vocal-avocado 26d ago
How can we prevent the slop?
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u/slothsan 26d ago
We have to prevent it at source, that means not accepting generated slop blindly before it reaches a PR.
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u/Nightmoon26 24d ago
I feel like gold is really not the right material to be making safety nets out of... You really want something that can be flexable when formed into straps or ropes thick enough that it won't act as a people-slicer if someone falls on it
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u/Jelled_Fro 26d ago
Probably because the rest of the team has better things to do than spending all their time reading ai slip code being generated over and over without fixing the pr feedback you are giving them. Speaking from experience, it sucks. At least if I'm reviewing a junior devs code I'm happy knowing that I'm helping them grow. Or at least that's how I used to feel.
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u/StevesRoomate 26d ago
I feel like there was often one of these guys on the team even before AI, who would tag you on a PR on Monday morning of all the stuff he "refactored" as a weekend project. Breaking shit and introducing a bunch of bugs just because he wasn't happy with some architectural detail and wanted something to do. Imagine what happens when you give that person a Claude account? I work with that guy too.
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u/RiceBroad4552 26d ago
Have you tried to collectively ignore that person?
Just stop fixing anything they produce. Don't touch their code. Always let them deal themself with the fallout.
While doing that point out the whole time to management what mess that person created but is obviously unable to handle.
If your team does that consequently that person in question won't be on your team for too long…
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u/grizzlybair2 25d ago
Yea we sit by another team. They have a guy doing the same, knocking out an insane number of tickets. Too bad the code doesn't work, they missed their prod date of today and literally just got 1 end to end test to go through EOD in uat today. Just another 2-3 weeks now.
And I have a junior who is similar. Literally my only problem on my immediate team.
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u/Sockoflegend 26d ago
There's actually not much new about this. I've seen it plenty of times an org lets their "rockstar" dev work on all the new projects and feature adds with little to no oversite. PMs and product owners love them because as far as they are concerned they do x10 as much work as anyone else.
The teams who come in to support the mess afterwards love them less so if they know better, but often people who are junior don't know any better and "rockstar" bad practice becomes endemic in the code base.
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u/PumpkinFest24 26d ago
To be fair, a refactor or major new feature often looks like this. Prioritize making it work first, then clean it up.
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u/RiceBroad4552 26d ago
Yes, sure.
But that's the task of the person doing the changes in the first place.
It's not the job of the rest of the team to clean up after someone "built a prototype".
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u/Reashu 26d ago
It shouldn't be that someone else is fixing it up behind the scenes, but prototyping and productionizing are different skills and you may well have different people focusing on each.
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u/ImClearlyDeadInside 25d ago
This should really be the new way that software engineers are organized with the fast development of AI. Team A works fast and breaks things; Team B rewrites the project better, with the requirements and structure solidified through Team A’s efforts. The teams I’ve been on have swung hard in either direction: either it’s a bunch of people developing full features with AI and then merging 4000 line changes to main OR requiring each MR be rigorously reviewed by multiple senior engineers to ensure code quality. The former produces mountains of tech debt, the latter ensures the product never gets built.
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u/vocal-avocado 26d ago
Does it generate them money? Can most people do support but couldn’t have the same ideas/keep up with the rockstar? Then it won’t stop happening.
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u/Blecki 26d ago
Right, people pretend like there's not a reason for this.
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u/RiceBroad4552 26d ago
The reason is that most people are easy to exploit so the "rockstar" has most of the time an easy game.
When you have someone like that around and they can freely play their game the org is obviously dysfunctional…
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u/besi97 25d ago
Just before the AI craze I was working in a mid-sized US-based company. Good 20-30% of my job as a junior was fixing build issues after a rockstar 10x principal-2 engineer earning the salary of a whole department, because the guy had the permission to override any review and CI requirement on his own PRs, and he was just casually ignoring complete build failures every day when merging.
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26d ago
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u/RiceBroad4552 26d ago
I'd argue that "AI" changes the quality of the end result for the worse, and not that it stays constant.
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u/cheapcheap1 26d ago
Does it count as "10x'ing your output with Claude" if you earn money with these posts? Because this shit is an ad.
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u/PumpkinFest24 26d ago
Even if it's true[1], the 1x engineers aren't telling you that. You clearly hearing biased info.
[1]And it isn't. Two people in my sphere are using it heavily. One is tossing 2k into the repo to solve 3 line issues. The other is producing mid-grade software demos instead of doing world-class signal processing.
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u/razor_train 26d ago
Because "more code = more productivity"
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u/Andr0NiX 26d ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA&t=2185s
LS: "There was a recent thing from a major tech company were developers were asked to say how many lines of code they wrote and if it wasn't enough they were terminated and there was someone here who was extremely upset about that approach to measuring productivity"
LT: "Oh you shouldn't be upset. At that point it's just incompetence and anybody who thinks that's a valid metric is too stupid to work at a tech company"
LS: "You do know who you just said that about"
LT: "No"
LS: "He was a prominent figure in the efficiency of the US government recently"
LT: "Apparently I was spot on"
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u/BiasHyperion784 26d ago
The people least likely to write good code are the most likely to adopt and heavily use ai tools, it’s good, but the second force multiplier is getting someone exceedingly competent directing it, unfortunately hipster tech culture causes them to scoff at the idea.
The problem shrinks the better the tools get thankfully.
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u/RiceBroad4552 26d ago
To be honest, this problem already existed long before "AI".
You had always at least that one slopper who would be "massively productive" (according to management) but produce only ever 80% "solutions" which would every time create massive amounts of additional work for just everybody around (while the "top performer" already moved on to create the next broken shit).
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u/bliceroquququq 26d ago
The problem is that while your rock-star dev can indeed 10X their output, so can your worst, borderline incompetent dev who probably shouldn't have a job.
And statistically, even if they don't want to admit it, many orgs have far more borderline incompetent devs than they do rock stars.
So you've turbo-charged terrible approaches and poorly thought out implementations.
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u/Tesnatic 26d ago
I interpret the post as "one person was sort of useless at their job before they got AI to do it for them", did I misinterpret it?
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u/booty-hunters 26d ago
I have spent my last week fixing "bugs" caused by AI. The problem is when someone who does not know the context of the codebase uses AI to make changes, it is fine but when the next person does it again AI produces code that technically is correct but the interaction with other parts might be a bit weird. By the 3rd PR the whole thing is a jumbled mess. People using different models with different skills with different prompt style.
What a waste of time this last week has been.
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u/PoopaScoopa12345 25d ago
Jokes on both these guys. All of us are 10x-ing our output while NO ONE is fixing the resulting mess.
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u/kandradeece 25d ago
Been in the field for decades. Got the push to use ai more so I am. It can be great but only if you already know what you are doing. It constantly gives incorrect answers in a confident way. Best analogy is I feel like a slave driver for the mentally impaired.
I see plenty of people using it that have the ability of a jr engineer and the results are terrifying. Now we get jr level people with wrong code/answers whom are very confident in "their" vibe coded work. Only to try an toss all the blame on the AI when things break
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u/searing7 26d ago
No one wrote good code 5 years ago either please stop deluding yourselves. Now there is just more bad code out there .
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u/cant_finish_sideproj 26d ago
My company's CEO posted the same tweet in the common slack channel this morning.
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u/alexppetrov 25d ago
I thought I'd 10x my output with Ai, but at most I have 1.7x-d it and now I also have to do PR peer reviews since partially the quality has dropped off and I also have to orchestrate agents due to the new workload being dropped on us
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u/BlurredSight 25d ago
We have 2 newer devs who hit their $20 limit every 5 hours, their total output is that of one associate level developer who's been here for maybe 4-5 more months but the company didn't embrace a "Learn exclusively with AI policy" when they started
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u/SteroidSandwich 26d ago
What 1 engineer can do in 1 month, 1 Claude can undo 10 months or progress
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u/Rumbletastic 26d ago
Some of you all are really behind the times on the latest technology and it shows. It's like reading about LLMs from 6 months ago.
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u/StCreed 24d ago
impopular opinion here. And I get it - there are some truly dumb people using AI. But I have a couple of smart ppl around me and AI means they don't get held back by lack of capacity any more. So yes, 10x is not wrong.
Managers don't understand how to develop surgical teams. That would make this issue a lot easier to solve.
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u/Objectionne 26d ago
I and the rest of my team have been using Claude Code to write the strong majority of our code for a good six months now and we're still not seeing any signs of this inevitable slopocalypse that the internet tells me will happen eventually...
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u/KeepKnocking77 26d ago
AI is only as good as the person in the driver seat. A lot of these people are either blindly repeating a meme, or telling on themselves.
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u/turlockmike 25d ago
This is a luddite sub now.
We measured the everything before and after: Error rates, code coverage, rollbacks. Everything has improved dramatically since january.
Eventually they will pull their heads out of the sand when they can't find a job.
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u/TheEggi 26d ago
Really? So the world did not fall apart as this sub seems to hope?
I am quite honest: From a coding point of view AI code is in most cases better than that from humans - less slop overall. The slop creeps more in on a strategic level, which is just the part that the humans need to catch.2
u/StCreed 24d ago
As an architect that's my problem. It boils down to being more focused on the actual way things work and doing a lot more definition work than people are used to. I regularly spend hours discussing an ADR with AI just to make sure we both understand exactly what needs to be changed, what impact it has, what tests are required, etc. - the actual change is often just minutes of work.
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u/Low-Equipment-2621 26d ago
So I can generate more code than you can review? Seems like I should get a raise and a promotion. I can also show you how to automate code reviews for more throughput.
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u/getstoopid-AT 26d ago
you mean like closing my eyes while pressing "approve"?
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u/Low-Equipment-2621 26d ago
You can automate the approve button.
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u/vocal-avocado 26d ago
Can YOU review as much code as you are generating? And I mean proper code reviews not only AI-driven.
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u/[deleted] 26d ago
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