Comment by swiftcoder
2 days ago
> Are they just copy/pasting their entire ticket description into Claude Code and having it iterate until they land on something that works?
That is exactly what they are doing, yes
2 days ago
> Are they just copy/pasting their entire ticket description into Claude Code and having it iterate until they land on something that works?
That is exactly what they are doing, yes
That's my take as well. I've had my unPRed branches grabbed up and blindly merged by an agent twice now. The guy doing it was shocked both times that his PR had my change sets in it.
Also one engineer is treating the code as assembly. I've asked some pointed questions about code in his PR and the response was "yeah, I don't know that's what the agent did".
Edit:
To everyone freaking out about the second guy. Yeah, I think being unable to answer questions about the code you're PRing is ill advised. But requirement gathering, codebase untangling, and acceptance testing are all nontrivial tasks that surround code gen. I'm a bit surprised that having random change sets slurped up into someone else's rubber stamped PR isnt the thing that people are put off by.
My friend is a CTO at a non-tech company and he's now dealing with code from non-SWEs trying to self serve with LLMs.
But it's like a kid running a lemonade stand. Total DIY weekend project quality stuff that they are demanding go live. Hardcoded credentials, no concept of dev/qa/prod environments, no logging, no tests, no source control.
I'm not really sure teaching basic SWE practices / SDLC / system design to people whose day job is like.. accounting makes sense compared to just accelerating developer productivity.
It’s the same dilemma as old: it’s easier to teach a doctor UML than a coder Doctoring. But, critically, that’s about making doctor-facing IT systems not performing their skilled jobs.
Bringing code does not help, but a validated user story with flow diagrams, a UI suggestion, and a valid ticket could. That’s the bridge to gap.
Were I that CTO I’d explain that code carries liability, SWEs can end up in jail for malfeasance, fines, penalties, and lawsuits are what awaits us for eff-ups. “Coders” get fired if their code doesn’t work. Same speech to the devs, do exactly as much unsolicited Accounting as you wanna get fired for. Talk fences, good neighbours.
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No, you should have forward deployed engineers sitting and working right beside these traditional non SW roles if you need to fully integrate AI into their mix.
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So he's being paid and is sitting there letting an AI tool do his work for him? Insanity.
We didn’t mind when typesetting was automated. Or when compilers were invented. Why is this different?
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To that last guy, as the manager I would say "What is it that you do here??"
That's just a straight-shooter with "upper management" written all over him.
He signs the TPS reports.
I then just basically space out for a while.
“I’m the prompter.”
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It's bizarre to me that people being paid to use their brains with a job title including the word "engineer", which essentially means "clever thought thinker" in Latin, just offloading all of their thinking to a bot instead of just using it as a way to ensure clean execution and faster understanding of the structures of underdocumented projects.
There's some people who are offloading all of their thinking to a bot, and I agree with you that I don't really understand this. But the good version of it is to offload some of your thinking to a bot so you can focus your own thinking on the parts that matter. My time is much better spent on "ah there is a scalability tradeoff here" than "I guess I have to initialize the FooBarProviderServiceProvider in a different spot so that I can pass a mock to the FooBarProvisionConsumer unit tests".
And why wouldn't they? Companies are quite literally instructing them to do so. I work at such a company and have heard similar anecdotes from colleagues that work at other companies.
Why wouldn't you do this even if not instructed to do so?
I can do so much more with my spare time now. I throw agents at problems and get way more done.
$1k in tokens every day is easy to hit.
What exactly are you “getting done”? I’m really curious what you’re doing with so many tokens.
To be fair, taking an average SWE at $160k/y, and spending $1k/m, and offloading mechanical ticket work from their working set sounds like a bargain to me. They could be spending the time on design and planning and working on new things, figuring out how to save costs in optimizations. In fact for every soul sucking mechanical task you offload, the better of you are overall.
It’s not like AI is the first time this happened. CI/CD and extensive preflight and integration and canary testing is also a way of saving engineer time and improving throughput at the cost of latency and compute resources. This is just moving up the semantic stack.
Obviously as engineers we say “awesome more features and products!” but management says “awesome fewer engineers!” either way pasting the ticket in and letting a machine do the work for a fraction of the cost was the right choice. There’s no John Henry award.
> pasting the ticket in and letting a machine do the work for a fraction of the cost was the right choice
If it were producing equivalent outcomes, sure. So far I haven't personally seeing strong evidence for that. LLMs do write code pretty competently at this point, but actually solving the correct problem, and without introducing unintended consequences, is a different matter entirely
This. LLMs are terrible at planning/architecture and maintaining clarity of vision across a project. There are lots of tools that mitigate these issues but they're going to keep coming up regardless because of the fundamental nature of LLMs.
If you're not doing the design of the solutions for problems as an engineer or at least making the decisions and owning the maintenance of that architecture/design, what even is your job at that point?
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> and offloading mechanical ticket work from their working set sounds like a bargain to me
Unfortunately the people who offload the work of understanding and interacting with tickets just end up offloading the consequences to everyone else who has to do extra work to make sure their LLM understands the task, review the work to make sure they built the right thing, and on and on.
The same thing happens when people start sending AI bots to attend meetings: The person freed up their own time, but now everyone else has to work hard to make sure their AI bot gets the right message to them and follow up to make sure what was supposed to happen in the meeting gets to them.
If someone sends a bot to a meeting, warn them the first time. Fire them the second, for exactly the reason that you said in your last paragraph: They're pushing their work onto other people.
Managers have processes for correcting for these behaviors and they fall into the second bucket of outcomes I mentioned.
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