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Comment by sublinear

4 days ago

Are you saying everyone who isn't barely starting their career is a genius? In the current state of things I'd gladly take mediocre work from a human over slop from an AI.

Seriously this. Doing code reviews on LLM created code is so frustrating. If the code was submitted by a junior engineer I could get on zoom with them and educate them, which would make them a better team mate, advance their career goals, and make the world slightly better. With AI created code the review process is a series of tiny struggles to dig up out of the hole the LLM created and get back to baseline code quality, and it'll probably be the same Sisyphean struggle with the next PR.

  • I had to review code that couldn't even do a straightforward map, filter, and reduce properly. But with management pushing hard for AI use, I feel powerless to push back against it.

  • Ha! Not just "the next PR", in my experience about 30% of the time you tell it "hey this slop you gave me is horribly broken because <reason>", and it says "you're absolutely right! I totally 100% understand the problem now, and I'll totally 100% fix that for you right now!", and then proceeds to deliver exactly the same broken slop it game me before.

    • Interesting, isn’t it?

      It knows that the apologetic tone and acknowledging understanding of your critique is the most probable response for it to generate. But that’s very different from actually understanding how it should change the code.

You have prompt skill issue.

  • The only study currently trying to measure productivity of experienced devs using LLMs showed they suffer a 19% decline in productivity.

    https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

    Since that study demonstrated that experienced developers currently suffer a decline in their productivity when using LLMs, it's perfectly likely that less experienced/junior developers who normally will struggle with syntax or simple tasks like organizing their code are the ones experiencing the boost of productivity from LLMs.

    Thus, it seems the devs benefitting the most from LLMs are the ones with the skill issue/more junior/early in their career.

    Which group do you belong to?