← Back to context

Comment by eestrada

3 days ago

I haven't had to deal with this in open source, but I have had to deal with coworkers posting slop for code reviews where I am the assigned reviewer.

I've noticed that slop code has certain tell tale markers (such as import statements being moved for no discernible reason). No sane human does things like this. I call this "the sixth finger of code." It's important to look for these signs as soon as possible.

Once one is spotted, you can generally stop reading; you are wasting your time since the code will be confusing and the code "creator" doesn't understand the code any better than you do. Any comments you post to correct the code will just be fed into an LLM to generate another round of slop.

In these situations, effort has not been saved by using an LLM; it has at best been shifted. Most likely it has been both shifted and inflated, and you bear the increased cost as the reviewer.

The telltale for me is the excessive comments. No reasonable human being would do all that extra, redundant work.