Comment by LPisGood
14 hours ago
This sounds easy in principle, but a half dozen of these sort sorts of massive PR’s per week is basically untenable. I’m not gonna read the hundreds of lines of added documentation to decide if they’re correct or not. The price of generating new words is just so much higher than the price of evaluating it that I can’t be bothered.
Just hit "deny." I've been training my co-workers that the AI-isms their "AI Assisted coding" do that some shit just isn't acceptable. I leave a comment and hit deny. It also helps that I control the policies on the repo and they can't merge in with a denial from anyone. So it's either a fix it, or explain why your work isn't getting done. My manager is also 100% with this.
I've denied for poor branch names and commits from AI. I've denied for too verbose of comments from AI. I've denied for parts of the code base being touched that are not relevant to the case they are working on (login isn't broken, your case is to add a check box in the settings pane, remove the changes made to login).
Pre-AI I wasn't fine with PRs with multiple features and touching irrelevant areas of the code base. Why would I be fine with it because my co-workers got new toys? You want AI to refactor a part of the codebase? Fine. Separate branch, new PR, and in the description, present an argument for it. Don't shoe horn it into something else. Also, I'm not obligated to hit approved on shit.
I may also be a bit privileged because I can be a pain in the ass to whole team. I may be slower, but I've got the numbers, my code is creating way less bugs then my "fast more efficient" co-workers.
Now suppose four of your teammates, each have three PR’s in the backlog and you have to explain to your manager that you’re the bottleneck.
As quoted from my comment: "My manager is also 100% with this."
5 replies →
... Poor branch names?
[flagged]
Coupled with the other comment of yours that was flagged, the tone of this is completely unacceptable.
Maybe consider some anger management therapy? Nothing you’re talking about is in any way acceptable. Physical violence at work? You can’t be serious.
Its not petty is, Im not changing our standards because people got hot new toys. These are code policies we've had. If your AI usage can not conform to them, that's on you, not me.
3 replies →
> but a half dozen of these sort sorts of massive PR’s per week is basically untenable.
Actually, rejecting them is precisely what will make them easy.
"Sorry, the comments are so bad I'm stopping here. Please fix them and then I'll resume the code review."
You're giving everybody (including yourself) more work by:
1. Reviewing the code (even if you skip the documentation).
2. Letting too many abstruse comments in which everyone in the team will have to read.
3. Allowing the behavior to continue.
Become the bottleneck so the team can talk about it. If they decide this shouldn't be a blocker, just declare you won't review the comments going forward.
> "Sorry, the comments are so bad I'm stopping here. Please fix them and then I'll resume the code review."
This is also how I do code review of AI work on my projects. If the work is offensive to the point I can't complete the review, I simply reject the code and tell the AI why. Then it goes off and fixes it. This repeats until the issues are either gone or are small enough that I can just fix them myself and move on.
There is no need to be upset. Just iterate until it's right. If it's cheap to write, it's equally cheap to rewrite.
I think you’re overestimating how easy it is to just declare I won’t be doing my job.
I am actually asking you to do your job. Pre-LLMs, if I got comments that were difficult to read in a code review, that PR isn't getting merged until they fix it. So: Review the docs. If it's that bad, just say "I don't understand these comments" and send it back.
6 replies →
This doesn't work because then you get fired for being a bottleneck.
The bottleneck existed before LLMs. Amdahl's Law applies. Just because code can be produced 10x faster doesn't mean much if other parts of the flow can't be sped up.
As I said here and elsewhere: If management is concerned code review is a bottleneck, let management be aware that the process has to change. Either the human is not as thorough, or he uses some combination of his brain + LLM to conduct the review.
It's a basic fact: They have a machine that produces a lot of code, but don't have a machine to review that code. The bottleneck is obvious. I'd love to build planes for $1 too, but physics applies.
2 replies →