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on Gopher (inofficial)
HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
zbyforgotp wrote 6 hours 43 min ago:
On the flip side if there is a bug in one of my systems I would rather
get a detailed bug report from an llm than a user message âxxx does
not workâ.
lacoolj wrote 15 hours 24 min ago:
This should be in the HN guidelines
hathawsh wrote 16 hours 33 min ago:
When I tell my coworkers to stop using AI to dress up their words, it's
not because I care about human effort. The problem is that my coworkers
often start with incorrect assumptions, and AI is good at amplifying
bad assumptions and making them sound plausible. I have to spend extra
time guessing at what the author originally wrote and then address the
partly-hidden original points rather than what the AI generated. Give
me your spelling errors, your grammar, your mumbles, your incoherent
streams of thought, your doubt and uncertainty. Those things are
extremely important, yet your robot obscures them.
Strangely, I've also observed that some customers respond very well to
words dressed up by AI, even if the words oversimplify the truth. Now
I'm working to understand why they want that. Are my customers not
swimming in AI slop like the rest of us?
BTW, this doesn't mean I'm anti-AI. AI coding is an incredible
superpower and I use it constantly, but it seems to me that AI coding
works because code expresses the minutiae that is rightfully omitted
from most other communication.
exe34 wrote 19 hours 24 min ago:
If somebody throws a slop PR at me, I'd love to review it with them.
I'd ask them to take me through it and explain everything until I
understand exactly what they did and why. Either it will make them
avoid me in the future, or it will open their eyes to how important it
is to understand what you are submitting for review. I probably won't
have to do it twice.
steveBK123 wrote 20 hours 13 min ago:
Yes, I worked with a guy (not for long) who had two modes of
interaction:
"it didnt work" - providing neither the code nor the error
"I ran this" - dropping 500 lines of code into slack, not specifying
where he ran it, what line it broke or what the error was
Either mode required 15 iterative questions to get to a useful state of
information.
paultopia wrote 20 hours 19 min ago:
Good rule to apply to companies too. If someone sics AI on me through
their customer service line, I feel totally free to sic AI right back
at them
thinkthatover wrote 20 hours 28 min ago:
god whenever I hear/see "genuinely" I get so triggered
steelkilt wrote 20 hours 29 min ago:
He was handed a gameboy before he could walk, but it didnât lessen
his humanity. He was handed a smartphone before middle school, but his
humanity remained intact. He started calling the âpeopleâ he met
on social media his friends, and humanity didnât suffer. But alas,
using AI is a bridge too far.
aanet wrote 20 hours 39 min ago:
Obligatory Marketoonist:
HTML [1]: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
teddyh wrote 20 hours 48 min ago:
The volume of LLM output is effectively infinite. Therefore, it is not
worth my time or effort reading a single syllable of it. I will not
read (nor correct) LLM output, since if I did, I would quickly be doing
nothing else with my life. And since LLM output is infinite, but I am
finite, my efforts would still be completely without results,
comparatively speaking.
(6 month old repost: < [1] >)
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45936352
ycui7 wrote 21 hours 3 min ago:
At one point, I was thinking that if any of my customer send me a snail
mail with an actual physical stamp on it, we will call the customer
immediately and solve their problem.
dennysora-main wrote 21 hours 7 min ago:
I interacting with others, I still read through the entire post and its
arguments.
And I write my replies before, I often have a LLM check for any errors
or miss thing.
LLM can help me catch blind spots or mistake.
I think LLMs can't replace our own thinking. For me, an LLM is good
tools for discuss ideas and talk me more knowledge.
My english is bad, but can help the LLM tto translate paper, help me
quick get the infomation.
I like face to face talk with others, Can help me triggers deep
thinking and funny
lenerdenator wrote 21 hours 8 min ago:
When I read things like this, I wonder how, exactly, people have time
for this sort of thing these days.
Lots of companies are led by people who think that GenAI should
increase productivity and are going to make damn sure that it is.
There's no room to figure out things like "etiquette" for how to pass
along AI-generated content to coworkers.
sutib wrote 21 hours 13 min ago:
If someone manages to devise a way to prove something was written by a
human they will make a lot of goola
huani wrote 21 hours 37 min ago:
its the old rule of reciprocity. If you want to receive something, you
should match the effort
cvoss wrote 21 hours 57 min ago:
I once received an internal defect report from my product's QA team. It
was long and obvious that what they did was feed the error log into an
LLM and ask it to diagnose. It was total nonsense.
I reported it to my manger and stated that I will not have my time
wasted this way. She was delighted to have this ammo because we have a
long standing beef with our QA for not putting in due diligence. LLMs
are like candy for them.
zingar wrote 21 hours 59 min ago:
We just agreed on our team that weâre not posting AI-generated text
into comms with humans.
sergiotapia wrote 22 hours 25 min ago:
Big source of my depressive feelings today come from this. I see people
online quite excited about AI output, nobody cares anymore. This was
supposed to be a tool to elevate the quality of work, not vomit things
out and put out fires like Orks trying to land a flaming plane with no
wheels.
Ylpertnodi wrote 22 hours 9 min ago:
And kitchen knives aren't supposed to be stuck in people.
boerseth wrote 22 hours 36 min ago:
There's a lot of art out there that is totally uninteresting, at least
to me, because it feels like the artist put little effort or thought
into it or or maybe even into honing their skills.
But if the art instead beems with intention and effort, chances are
that it will be interesting. And in order for anyone to create
something so brimming with signs of effort, they must have cared about
the piece, the message, the artform, or something along the process.
This post talks about effort and attention, but you could phrase it as
a question of reciprocal "caring". If you want me to care, show me that
you even care yourself.
It is getting harder and harder to suss out what is genuine though.
relativeadv wrote 22 hours 39 min ago:
I've been writing technical documentation and architecture docs that no
one ever reads for years. I now write those same documents using ai in
a fraction of the time. No one reads those either but they are
memorialized so that no one can bitch about tribal knowledge.
softwaredoug wrote 22 hours 58 min ago:
It's not just about being annoyed - it's very practical.
If the creator exerted human effort, they'll be able to maintain it.
They can take responsibility for it. Even if the value of the 100% AI
generated artifact is amazing, and the "creator" of it can't actually
maintain it, then what's the point?
It's similar to scenarios I've seen where a brilliant ML person comes
into an org, trains a model, that seems to solve an important problem.
Invariably when that person leaves the org, the ML model stops being
used, the team falls back on older / technically worse methods. But the
team can be responsible / own it in a way they couldn't the brilliant
one-off work.
Silasdev wrote 23 hours 7 min ago:
I had a new colleague on the team, who I had to on-board. I gave him a
few simple tasks, just to get him into the whole setup. He literally
copy/pasted my task description into Claude and asked it to complete
the task. To begin with, I didn't suspect this, so when he asked for
more help, I gladly wrote up a detailed explanation with more
information and detail for him to learn. Little did I know, he never
read it but put it directly into Claude. Not even sure how I should
handle it, but my first instinct was to get extremely annoyed.
Maybe this is just how things are going to be. But in that case, I'm
done spending my time being a helpful idiot talking indirectly to a
robot through another person.
tristor wrote 19 hours 54 min ago:
> Not even sure how I should handle it, but my first instinct was to
get extremely annoyed.
My first instinct would be to have a /very/ direct conversation with
that person and their manager, and the follow-on would be to escalate
it further leading to their termination. That sort of behavior is
unprofessional in the extreme, even in the era of AI.
nosioptar wrote 20 hours 28 min ago:
I always get "Foreign Object" by the Mountain Goats stuck in my head
wheb I deal with people like that...
(Track 31):
HTML [1]: https://themountaingoats.bandcamp.com/track/foreign-object-j...
dude250711 wrote 21 hours 47 min ago:
> Not even sure how I should handle it, but my first instinct was to
get extremely annoyed.
Have you watched Frieren? Just keep a distance from them. [1] "Demons
are deceptive by nature, and typically speak with humans for a
specific purpose, such as securing mercy or lowering vigilance. They
treat language as a tool, using words without truly grasping their
meaning. ..."
HTML [1]: https://frieren.fandom.com/wiki/Demon
everyone wrote 23 hours 30 min ago:
I feel like I live on a different planet to many on HN.. Any time I've
dabbled with the current roster of LLMs for work tasks (I'm a game
programmer). They are utterly useless, complete waste of time.
Definitely not something that seems promising and warrants more time
invested.
gwbas1c wrote 23 hours 30 min ago:
I thought this would apply to marketing / SPAM.
I find that I actively filter all "computer generated" attempts to
contact me: Mailing lists, "engagement" notifications, ect, is pretty
much ignored. I only respond to human-initiated contact.
This is especially the case with cold outreach from recruiters: I get a
lot of poor AI-generated outreach from recruiters, which are
time-consuming on my part to engage with.
gwd wrote 1 day ago:
"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good
principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research
before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer.
Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own?
Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you
with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in
kind. Someone obviously engaging with your ideas and taking time to
explain their position? Take time to engage with their ideas too.
cgio wrote 11 hours 47 min ago:
Short responses are increasingly becoming a signal of genuine human
attention.
eli_gottlieb wrote 13 hours 6 min ago:
This is the policy I was always told to exercise about cold emails,
both those I receive and those I send. Someone seems to have spent
weeks reading your books and papers before emailing to meet with you?
Make time for that guy. Someone just asks if you've got time to
meet about your work because they'd like to work for you? LOL they
didn't check enough to realize you're not a supervisor.
reddit_clone wrote 17 hours 51 min ago:
> Give a cursory answer
That may be enough in some cases.
Sometimes people are not looking for fully fleshed out high-effort
answers. They want a pointer (to documentation, or a repo) to get
going from someone more experienced.
Google search may throw up too much information and it is hard to
make a choice. A one sentence answer from an expert may be enough to
set them on the right path.
cestith wrote 19 hours 1 min ago:
From the other side, there have been brief tutorials for many years
about how to ask useful questions in a technical forum. Making
hundreds of other people fish for details about your case is poor
form. [1] is a pretty good example.
Going back more than two decades is ESRâs âHow to Ask Smart
Questionsâ.
HTML [1]: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-ask-good-technical-...
HTML [2]: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
monkeydust wrote 21 hours 12 min ago:
AI has collapsed the cost of producing content while leaving the cost
of reviewing, verifying higher imho. This has inverted the economics
of collaboration. Reviewer attention, not output volume, is now the
scarce resource, this happened with my engineering teams (PR reviews)
and is now happening in my world in Product.
whstl wrote 18 hours 54 min ago:
In some cases there's also no preparation or verification happening
at all, which massively inflates the productivity gains of AI. Lots
of VCs and investors asking companies to move into "trust the AI"
mode.
I once consulted for a company in the content marketing business
that was one of the largest and fastest growing startups of its
country. The content production in itself was "cheap", a dollar for
500 words. But it collapsed, due to the unbearable amount of people
required to review
Now virtually all content is generated by AI and the old customers
don't have anyone to verify anymore.
Companies are made of people who are shitty to each other but trust
machines blindly.
andrekandre wrote 10 hours 1 min ago:
> Now virtually all content is generated by AI and the old
customers don't have anyone to verify anymore.
i see this first-hand at $company, where the pr's are so obtuse
and descriptions are incomprehensible or just too long and
gratuitous that thorough code review is also falling by the
wayside and becoming more of a "rubber stamp"; this is what
management is calling "productivity boost"...
toss1 wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
Yup. The most concise version I've heard of this, which I find
useful for many situations, is:
"If it isn't important to you, it isn't important to me."
TallGuyShort wrote 21 hours 14 min ago:
"Use your brain before you use mine"
justin66 wrote 22 hours 20 min ago:
> Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses?
Either don't respond, or respond in kind.
Or, depending on the context, perhaps give a thorough enough answer
with citations that it should either answer questions on the topic
fully or explain where anyone interested in the topic can do their
own research, such that if the question is asked again one could just
link to your previous post.
This might not satiate a poster if they're dumb enough, but it's
worth remembering that the post will be searchable and usable for
reference by other people.
nucleardog wrote 23 hours 1 min ago:
I've had this same policy since before AI. I kind of formalized it
for myself (and this team) after enough instances of "I'm trying to
do X. It's not working. Help." type messages.
You need to put as much effort into the question as you expect
someone to put into the answer.
It's not "fairness" or "AI" or anything else, it's that doing this
any other way fundamentally fucks up the team dynamics.
You have a problem. You want someone's help. If the cost to you is
effectively nil (or negative, since you're asking someone to do your
job for you), but the cost to the other person is non-zero, then
incentives aren't lining up here. Pretty quickly that person is going
to start carrying too much load and become a bottleneck.
It can also mask that the context of the work is too concentrated in
one person, and does little to nothing to help build that elsewhere
in the team.
The other end of this is exactly what you're saying--put as much
effort into the answer as they put into the question. You're not
doing anyone a service by taking their low effort input and giving
them high effort output, least of all yourself. If someone asks "how
do I X", that's low effort. If you happen to know the answer off the
top of your head, spare a few sentences to explain or point them
where in the code they need to be. If you don't know, don't go track
it down for them.
msla wrote 12 hours 16 min ago:
When I'm a newbie at things, I tend to have the opposite problem: I
can overthink things to Hell and gone, but since I don't know what
I'm doing, I focus on the wrong things and 80% of my effort is
worthless. Like trying to make a multithreaded GUI in tkinter in
Python: I tried to find a good way to do it, but the answer is a
brief "Don't do that, use root.after() instead so your worker
function can run in the main thread without blocking the event
loop." I just had the wrong mental model and put forth effort an
expert would have avoided entirely.
Slow_Hand wrote 15 hours 44 min ago:
I intuitively put this much effort into asking good questions when
I need help, and what I often find is that by spending time to
formulate a question that makes it easy for others to help me I end
up discovering the answer for myself or identifying a much more
salient problem that I should be asking instead.
In this way, putting more effort into the question ends up putting
me closer to the answer without actually receiving help.
Sohcahtoa82 wrote 20 hours 38 min ago:
> after enough instances of "I'm trying to do X. It's not working.
Help." type messages.
Related to this, I will never for the life of me understand why
people think it's okay to say "I get an error" without saying what
the error is.
I don't expect a non-technical person to understand the error, but
I do expect a non-technical person to know that what the error
message is is useful to the person trying to help you and to
proactively provide the contents of the error message, even if it's
a shitty cell phone picture of the error.
purpleflashing wrote 4 hours 47 min ago:
Because modern tech and modern tech support has a terrible UX in
general built by engineers around their engineering heuristics.
By the time a non-tech user reaches the point of seeing an error
they are cognitively overloaded and since the errors are pretty
much incomprehensible to the users, the user doesnât get the
feeling of it being anything thatâs tied to their actions.
Itâs just anxiety-inducing noise, it never registers as
something that has a meaning, so even copying and pasting an
error feels like a meaningless step that their overloaded and
already anxious brains skip.
If errors are meant to be shared with tech support, the UX should
reflect that (and some interfaces do that where you just have a
button to send the crash report or smth). If errors are meant to
give users agency to solve the problem on their own, the UX
should reflect that too.
gwd wrote 17 hours 18 min ago:
The thing is, they've still taken the time to actually write "I
get an error". So by principle of reciprocity, you can just take
2 seconds to say, "What's the error?" Usually that won't lead
anywhere; but as long as you don't spend more time than they are,
you aren't really wasting much time; and they can't exactly
complain that you weren't helpful. And occasionally it will lead
somewhere, in which case it's a win.
astqs wrote 21 hours 1 min ago:
Iâd add that itâs basic respect and decency for your fellow
humans who are paying for the attention with their own life.
nucleardog wrote 10 hours 17 min ago:
Yeah, that's a reason to do it too! And one I'd hope would land
with most people, but "respect and decency" aren't universal
unfortunately.
hluska wrote 22 hours 8 min ago:
I donât formalize anything that extreme for my teams because I
canât diagnose people, but I know that things like anxiety,
imposter syndrome and a whole wack of things that arenât related
to work get involved. Itâs acceptable to ask for help. I like to
know what people have tried but sometimes they donât know how to
start. And thatâs a great place to start.
I guess we all have different styles but some may be more inclusive
than others.
nucleardog wrote 10 hours 23 min ago:
Yeah, after the dozenth time with the same person where the
"help" is "playing 20 questions to finally get the stack trace
out of them which they should have sent in the first place and
then then error explains exactly what is wrong and what they need
to look at next" you might feel a little different about it. Or
not.
End of the day, though, there's a huge, obvious difference
between "asking for help" and "asking for someone to do all my
thinking for me".
As a _person_, I'm very sympathetic to why that might be
happening. I will do everything I can to help. And sometimes it
does feel like I'm bordering on practicing psychology without a
license.
As someone responsible for making sure _everyone_ is getting paid
this month so they can keep a roof over their head and their kids
fed, I do need to be mindful of and address issues that are
dragging the entire team down. Regardless of why it's happening,
if we're in a situation where you are doing the more company more
good by _not showing up to work_ (you're contributing
negatively), we have a problem and it needs to be addressed. We
can work together on addressing it, but we can't ignore it.
For whatever it's worth, every single person on the team I manage
says one of the things they love most about working here is how
helpful and cooperative everyone is. Everybody's always happy to
hop on a call and work through stuff together and really has a
mindset of a rising tide lifting all boats--people are always
volunteering to pitch in and help others before being asked. I
like to think I've had some part in creating that environment. I
am _more_ than happy to _help_. I had to starting making a
distinction between "helping" and "doing someone's work for them"
because I was getting burned out from overwork. I made it
"formal" because I work with the kind of people who really
appreciate clear rules and guidelines for things, including
communication
bisby wrote 21 hours 24 min ago:
How the problem and request are presented matter. "I don't know
where to start" is a different problem than "I've done nothing,
just solve this for me." And how someone shows an effort was made
will vary person to person, so I agree a strict formalized set of
rules doesn't make sense. The concept boils down to "expect
people to put forth some effort of their own"
"Teams" are also going to have different dynamics than "strangers
on a help forum."
CWuestefeld wrote 23 hours 20 min ago:
This has been my policy for a couple of decades. When somebody posts
just a bare link (especially if it's to a video), I refuse to click.
If it's not worth your time to introduce why something is relevant,
then it's not worth my time to go figure that out.
Archer6621 wrote 23 hours 36 min ago:
These kinds of principles are sensible at their core, and I am a big
proponent of the mindset, but the main problem as a sibling comment
pointed out in a way is that this assumes that everyone is striving
for an honest and accurate correlation between display of effort and
value, and that everyone is looking deep enough into and behind that
display to recognize the true value behind it. But actual effort, let
alone value, is not always clearly visible or honestly displayed, and
the perception of it is also subject to your own biases.
You could say that people have the responsibility to demonstrate that
they put in the effort and created value, but then you get the
situation where people naturally optimize perception of effort or
value over actual effort or value, because in the end that is what is
rewarded. Then you can also say that people also have the
responsibility to look a bit closer before estimating real value, but
that takes more effort and people naturally strife towards
efficiency. I would guess that the problem today is that the balance
between these two is off, and we're doing too much of the former and
too little of the latter.
paulddraper wrote 15 hours 33 min ago:
Counterpoint: I know it when I see it.
CWuestefeld wrote 21 hours 42 min ago:
an honest and accurate correlation between display of effort and
value
Hmmm. Your choice of words here has just sparked a realization for
me.
Before you said this, I was completely on board with the original
post. But in juxtaposing effort with value, it illustrates that
we're basing the idea on the Labor Theory of Value. That idea seems
intuitive, and Adam Smith wrote about it 250 years ago. But it
turns out that LTV is very wrong. Economists showed that effort
does NOT impart value.
CrazyStat wrote 20 hours 28 min ago:
Labor theory of value is a Marxist idea, not an Adam Smith idea.
Internet Marxists sometimes point to a passage in The Wealth of
Nations to suggest that Smith also supported a labor theory of
value, but this isâin the most generous interpretationâa
misreading. Smith says that the value of a thing can be measured
by how much labor it can be exchanged for: an exchange theory of
value, not a labor theory of value (which says the value of a
thing is based on how much labor it takes to create).
CWuestefeld wrote 18 hours 8 min ago:
I mostly agree with your criticism of my post. I was being
generous trying to avoid being inflammatory here, since I know
there are readers that strongly support socialist ideas (in the
strict sense, not just the "safety net" sense). It was
certainly Marx that pushed it so hard.
But researching this a bit, I find that it still predates Marx.
I find:
Sir William Petty, 1662: "If a man can bring to London an ounce
of Silver out of the Earth in Peru, in the same time that he
can produce a bushel of Corn, then one is the natural price of
the other."
More important, it seems that David Ricardo (a big name in
economic history), in 1817 latched onto what Smith had written
and states it quite definitively.
CrazyStat wrote 16 hours 56 min ago:
Fair. The concept predates Marx, but in contemporary thought
is most closely associated with Marxism.
The quote about silver from Peru is particularly striking to
my ears. Thatâs a long and dangerous journey, and obviously
(to my modern sensibilities) the person making it should be
compensated appropriately for the far greater risk taken on.
hliyan wrote 20 hours 38 min ago:
Use value or exchange value?
mindwok wrote 22 hours 56 min ago:
Iâd push back on this, I think people have a very intrinsic sense
of what is valuable and often if you think itâs âperceptionâ
of value being rewarded, itâs just that you value something
different than that person.
Even in performative scenarios, like say someone gets promoted at
work over another person because they are a great âperformerâ
and always make noise, whereas the other actually delivers -
theyâre being promoted because the promotion is defensible and
legible for their superior. That is true value for them, just not
to another viewer.
suncemoje wrote 23 hours 6 min ago:
I experienced a similar interaction recently, where this principle
was hard to apply, when I was emailing with a CTO / hiring manager
who had some "deeper" screening questions. It was essentially:
1. HM: AI generated email with "tailored" questions
2. Me: AI assisted response with answers (I confess)
3. HM: AI generated email with a "thoughtful" response + invite
4. Me: AI generated "thank you & looking forward" response ...
Looking back at the thread, I have to laugh and cry at the same
time. It's so obvious and sad.
dentemple wrote 23 hours 48 min ago:
> Either don't respond, or respond in kind.
!
dredmorbius wrote 19 hours 29 min ago:
< [1] > ?
HTML [1]: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/14/exclamation/
bluGill wrote 1 day ago:
> Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses?
Either don't respond, or respond in kind.
"I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to
make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal.
The length of the response doesn't indicate effort.
Bootvis wrote 22 hours 21 min ago:
For him, the cost of editing was much larger. Condensing your
writing in his time meant rewriting it more concisely, requiring
strictly more time than collecting his thoughts as he went.
With LLM's, we are in a new state of the world: it can expand any
one sentence off hand remark in an essay.
necovek wrote 21 hours 56 min ago:
You seem to be talking about how one can expand information into
useless babbling, whereas you are responding to a comment about
condensing information into true essence.
bluGill wrote 21 hours 14 min ago:
This is about human attention and what is worth getting it.
Both points are very important and valid.
gwd wrote 23 hours 1 min ago:
Sure; I was using shorthand. Sometimes a whole edifice of ideas
rests on one shaky one; and if you can challenge that one the whole
thing falls apart. But even being able to identify the shaky one
demonstrates engagement. That's really the key.
keiferski wrote 23 hours 15 min ago:
This is true if you're writing a letter about a difficult topic.
For HN comments, 99.9% of the time, a short comment is a low effort
one and should be disregarded.
dijksterhuis wrote 22 hours 26 min ago:
long, low: copypasta; rant; sales; slop.
(brevity, purposeful /s).
mlhpdx wrote 22 hours 37 min ago:
on the other hand, when I see a long post here I assume itâs
yet another ego-driven tirade and skip past it.
hliyan wrote 20 hours 32 min ago:
> yet another ego-driven tirade
I tried to recall the last time I saw what I felt was an
ego-driven tirade on HN comments, and I'm currently drawing a
blank. There's a lot of what's called "performative erudition",
and there is the occasional lengthy diatribe, but I would call
neither one of those ego-driven tirades.
warkdarrior wrote 15 hours 40 min ago:
"performative" = "ego-driven"
Telaneo wrote 23 hours 27 min ago:
There are obvious exceptions to that rule. Laconic phrases are
short but have a lot to them, while AI slop is long while having
very little to it. But it's a decent rule of thumb when considering
the middle of the bell curve.
someguyiguess wrote 23 hours 30 min ago:
Couldn't agree more.
jappgar wrote 1 day ago:
It takes considerable energy to train models and run inference. You
can't dismiss AI generated content as "low effort", but you can
dismiss it as a wasteful diversion.
lewispollard wrote 21 hours 8 min ago:
That's like saying that low effort human-generated posts are worth
your time because the phones and computers they're writing on take
a lot of time and effort to build from scratch.
doctorpangloss wrote 21 hours 17 min ago:
@dang it's too bad the most interesting single comment in this
whole thread is grayed out. as much as i love reading the same
thing written 1,200 different ways, maybe the whole system needs to
be revisited
Telaneo wrote 23 hours 26 min ago:
The person copy-pasting an AI response is generally not the person
who trained said AI. Even if the total amount of effort is fairly
large, the amount of effort put in by the person you're actually
interacting with, is generally small.
inigyou wrote 23 hours 4 min ago:
Back when people would train Markov bots on IRC that was actually
something novel for the first 30 minutes and you could appreciate
it because they put in the work
kingkawn wrote 23 hours 36 min ago:
You canât take credit for other peopleâs work to displace the
absence of your own
yCombLinks wrote 23 hours 55 min ago:
Way to miss the point. Bob on the other side of the room didn't
train the model
noobcoder wrote 1 day ago:
Can you tell if its written by AI or not? I will read it once I get the
answer
spaceman_2020 wrote 1 day ago:
I mentally switch off the moment I see an AI vibecoded landing page or
article or video
I don't care what your offer is - if you can't even be bothered to even
dress up your stuff for me, a human, I'm not going to consume it
alanwreath wrote 1 day ago:
This reminds me of a Pre-LLM-slop era issue I had with a process that a
co-worker had created via a shared script that would automate combining
many dependabot PRâs into one consolidated PR.
The script was excellent because it simplified the review process for a
single repo (that had many competing dependsbot PRâs) and it also
happened to do this across increasingly many many different repoâs
simultaneously.
Funny thing is, however, that it also created a team dynamic where who
ran the script became almost a race because the effort in creating x
prâs didnât correspond at all to the effort required to review x
prâs.
The optics were also lopsided since the script would operate on the
runnerâs local machine and so it would have seemed as if the person
who made all these PRâs was highly efficient at producing when in
fact it was the reviewer doing the majority of the work.
Also reviewing represented a chunk of a developerâs day so it would
affect other actual work the developer was tasked to do anyways.
In an agile workplace points (correctly or not) completed are
attributed only to the code creator with no points at all being shared
by those who reviewed the work, and rightfully so Iâd argue because
tangentially reviewers can also tend to just click âapproveâ (or
slap a LGTM) without much effort into critiquing a piece or giving a
thoughtful review. Why? It slows down the introduction of the feature
(the PM wonât like that, why would you slow down the process eh? You
grumpy goose), it messes with team dynamic (you may end up offending
those who you review, who also happen to be the one who you need to
review your work, who then may be petty or worse, mud slow to review
your own PRâs), it takes additional time to provide reviews that seem
as if you even read the PR or donât come off as flippant (did you
provide examples or a suggested refactor or detailed reasons), and it
takes context because you may be working currently on a totally
different project (regardless of your experience/authority in the
PRâed repo), so giving an honest review may sacrifice even more time
to first review the purpose of the PR and how that lands in the context
of the target repo(s) and then sacrifice the time necessary to reorient
yourself to the task you previously had in process. With all
thisâ¦that âapproveâ button becomes sooooo tempting.
Itâs funny because fast forward some of the ways I battle
increasingly prolific AI generated material is through GitHubâs
CoPilot bot. I ask it to do the review first and when it gives the
review there is none of that dynamic because it wasnât me who levied
the criticism and also itâs not me who is trying to block code
integration (so no grumpy goose or team dynamics problems). Having a
bot do preliminary checks almost does what git hooks did for team
dynamics way back when automation of linting, testing, style, etc was
introduced as a common part of the review process. And I say
âalmostâ because a)sometimes the critiques from the bot are wrong
and b) the critiques arenât necessarily deterministic, so just
because they are there or not doesnât mean you are truly relieved of
that portion of the review process (for better or worse).
tomaskafka wrote 1 day ago:
I strongly believe any platform that wants to avoid turning into slop
pile needs to
1. enforce marking any AI generated content as such
2. allow people to filter out the AI content if they want
3. enforce draconic punishments for violation of 1
We might arrive at the moment where this is regulated by law.
izucken wrote 1 day ago:
human attention is all you need
KerrickStaley wrote 1 day ago:
A somewhat related experience: I asked for advice on Twitter about
something and got two unhelpful AI-generated responses (from accounts I
have never heard of / donât follow) and no human responses. The thing
is that I already asked multiple frontier AIs the same question and
didnât get a satisfying answer. I specifically went to Twitter
because AI did not have the answers I was looking for. Providing an AI
answer to a human question assumes that the asker hasnât already done
their homework and tried asking an AI.
nusl wrote 1 day ago:
I've seen this happen a bunch too, though fortunately it hasn't been
_that_ common. More often is managers that don't understand things
using AI tools to try to understand them, mostly failing, and then
regurgitating the LLM output during a meeting. Added as a link on my
blog, too, since I have a similar article.
sceptic123 wrote 1 day ago:
Or in other words:
HTML [1]: https://noslopgrenade.com/
Sharlin wrote 1 day ago:
In any human relationship, nobody wants to be the one who noticeably
makes more effort to communicate, keep in touch, resolve conflicts, and
so on. The idea of reciprocity and fairness are deeply entrenched in
our minds, and that of many other social animals. If they don't care
about me, why should I care about them? It's the iterated prisoner's
dilemma again â freeriding is equivalent to defecting.
zkmon wrote 1 day ago:
That's not correct. If human attention requires human effort, that
forces human effort all the way down the chain, with no machine output
being possible.
You can't say "you can't feed me machine output directly". Machine
output is meant to reduce the cognitive load for human processing.
If your colleague is forwarding AI output directly to you, that means
they think the AI has reduced the cognitive load for you, and also you
are the best person to process that output, instead of them.
You just need to change your perception about the purpose of AI.
bonzog wrote 1 day ago:
Perfect. I find myself applying the same principle to online discussion
boards and comment threads. Humans post a question looking for other
human input and get replies saying "I asked Gemini and it said...". I
find that ignorant and rude when the context is a request for human
insight.
juanre wrote 1 day ago:
A couple of weeks ago I essentially failed the Turing test (took to be
an AI). I found it a bit annoying, so I built Possibly Made By A Human.
It tracks your keyboard use (not the content, ms between keystrokes
etc) and produces a signature for you. It can of course be spoofed, but
that also takes some effort.
Actually made by a human, signature:
HTML [1]: https://possiblymadebyahuman.com/7PuEdZs1i1
smokedetector1 wrote 19 hours 48 min ago:
This is one of the coolest tech things I've seen in a while. Can you
explain how the "Check a document" works? I'm not sure I understand
how you would check if the timing aligns based only on the text
content.
juanre wrote 19 hours 27 min ago:
Thanks! I had a lot of fun doing it.
The signature includes a hash of the text, done at the browser so
that the server does not have to see the content.
smokedetector1 wrote 18 hours 41 min ago:
Ah, okay! Would you mind explaining what does "comparing wording,
not exact text" mean?
juanre wrote 18 hours 17 min ago:
It's a very poorly written way of saying that instead of
storing your text it uses a hash of your text to sign. When you
want to check the signature you only need to hash the text to
check, again without touching the server.
smokedetector1 wrote 10 hours 19 min ago:
I must agree that is quite poorly phrased
hathym wrote 1 day ago:
a solution waiting for a chrome extension :)
juanre wrote 1 day ago:
I wrote it! I just haven't told anyone yet (nor tested it :-) This
is a fun side-project, I don't have much time to play with it.
HTML [1]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/possiblymadebyahu...
janpeuker wrote 1 day ago:
This is beautiful. I even had people reach out to me with suspiciously
long "long time no chat" instant messages until I realised they were AI
written (in one case misspelling the name of their own partner). "If
you are requesting human attention, demonstrate human effort" is going
to be my new answer to that!
s_dev wrote 1 day ago:
This is exactly the same as the ""If you didn't take the time to
write something, I'm not going to the take the time to read it"
mantra that was floating about HN a few months ago.
sva_ wrote 1 day ago:
I think in many cases people use LLM outputs without even
understanding the contents of it. You're only really able to say
something in your own words if you understand it. As a matter of
fact, it is a good way of probing if you truly grok something. So
it isn't just laziness to write, but also laziness (or inability)
to understand.
frameset wrote 1 day ago:
I've thought this for a while, and I summarise it as:
If you want me to take time to read it, you should take the time to
write it.
jstummbillig wrote 1 day ago:
I increasingly find that I don't care whether I am talking to an
anonymous AI or an anonymous human, and believe that we will
increasingly stop caring.
Because why not? AI will simply on average be nicer to talk to than
most humans, with clearer thinking and better arguments, less
contradictions, and easier to comprehend.
I don't know how humans could compete with that (but it also does not
seem all that horrible, given that it will be available to every
human.)
This is not to say that this idea is uncomplicated or comfortable, in
different ways. Just that I think it's true and that it might even be
good.
hooverd wrote 20 hours 49 min ago:
have you considered that you're just progressively lowering your
threshold for discomfort?
throw4847285 wrote 23 hours 40 min ago:
It's the argument from misanthropy again!
AI is seen as unique innovation, but in terms of the real purpose it
serves, it is the logical extension of something like Doordash. "I
don't like people. I don't even want to call one on the phone to
order a pizza. Make me a tool that lets me avoid that, please."
Let me pose an alternative narrative. Rather than interacting with
humans being intrinsically unpleasant (though for some people it is
far more unpleasant than others), the technology is lowering your
threshold for discomfort, step by step.
barrell wrote 1 day ago:
I think itâs safe to say that this will not be consensus.
Personally, I am getting increasingly (irrationally) angry at AI
generated content. AI generated art quite literally makes me
nautious. I mean an actual, physical reaction where I feel queasy.
I know Iâm not the only one who feels this way, and notice more and
more people reporting the same. Several of my non-technical
AI generated content is bland and soulless. Thereâs only so much
bland and soulless most people can take in their life before they
start to get fed up.
When everything feels the same, nothing is interesting anymore.
jstummbillig wrote 1 day ago:
That is not how it will play out.
Everyday AI writing was not a thing with GPT 3.5. It happened more
around GPT 4o. And now some people are entirely comfortable with
using AI writing and not even trying to hide it (while, I would
agree, it's obviously still fairly garbage and easily identifiable,
which helps with triggering strong averse reactions).
However the models are getting better at everything, including
writing for the past years. Why would that stop now? It's
reasonable to assume that the makers also know about bad writing,
dislike it, and thus the models will get trained to get even better
at it.
Eventually how will you be able to tell? You won't. You can't. And
that goes for the rest of us. And I suspect everything will just
feel somewhat nicer.
barrell wrote 1 day ago:
To claim there was amazing progress in the past therefore there
will be amazing progress in the future is an inductive fallacy.
And as someone who gets dozens if not hundreds of AI generated
emails I have to go through every day, it is _incredibly_ easy to
spot which ones are AI generated and which are human written.
By its nature AI generated content is statistically consistent,
the narrative equivalent of monotone speech. I donât know
anyone that canât spot it a mile away at this point, and the
more people are confronted with slop, the more attuned they
become to it.
joshuaS98 wrote 1 day ago:
Welcome to the age of slop.
dofm wrote 1 day ago:
AI generated output is rudeness.
We developers understand this when we are forced to read slop, and most
of us recognise it in art and music.
I wonder if we forget that people using unthinking, default interfaces
in AI generated apps might start to feel the same way: âit feels like
no care was taken here so why should I give it my time?â
maurits wrote 1 day ago:
I have publicly stated that if you can't be bothered to write, I can't
be bothered to read.
mihaaly wrote 1 day ago:
Not true for HR. Despite their name, which is a complete mislead -
except handling humans as resources -, nothing human exists there,
robotic approaches are the norm there.
So feel free to use AI to pimp your resume, they will use AI to process
it.
flowerthoughts wrote 1 day ago:
If the requester stops applying common sense, the reviewer has to apply
more of it, and there's a finite review budget. I will deal with
requests on a lowest review effort-first basis, just like you did on
the other side.
protocolture wrote 1 day ago:
(Human) Attention is all you need.
jmeri wrote 1 day ago:
Why should I bother to read something someone else has not bothered to
write?
madaxe_again wrote 1 day ago:
It really depends. In many cases, you absolutely shouldnât.
In some however, you should. For instance, yesterday I sent a lengthy
email in a language I barely speak threatening legal action against a
business. I had an LLM translate/write it as itâs a language Google
translate makes a mess of, every time.
So in that case, youâd be advised to read it lest you end up in
court.
boomlinde wrote 19 hours 55 min ago:
Did you bother to read the resulting translation?
madaxe_again wrote 14 hours 41 min ago:
Yup, translated it back through Google and double checked it
wasnât giving me horseshit.
tristor wrote 23 hours 36 min ago:
If you are operating a business in a part of the world where you
expect to engage in the court system, you should hire someone that
is fluent in the language spoken in that part of the world to act
on your behalf. If you cannot afford to do so, or refuse to do so,
why would anyway take your legal threats seriously?
madaxe_again wrote 4 hours 44 min ago:
Consumer dispute, not business - and yes, if it goes to court, of
course I will hire a lawyer.
scotty79 wrote 1 day ago:
This should be a rule in the advertising industry.
dwd wrote 1 day ago:
And no one has mentioned Rovo yet.
Atlassian's in-built AI assistant for JIRA will generate a task
description with a complete SDLC task breakdown, requirements and
deliverables.
While the person creating the task will need to provide some details
and modify some of the generated text (if they bother to read it) - the
sheer verbosity and the fact it's clearly generated just makes you not
want to engage with it.
xyzal wrote 1 day ago:
How about reviving key signing parties?
avmich wrote 1 day ago:
Why this suddenly becomes urgent? For long time we had automatic emails
with "thank you" which weren't written by humans, why something is
different today?
vaylian wrote 1 day ago:
I found these e-mails always impolite. I knew perfectly well, that
they were an automated response that only causes work on my end.
But this HN submission also highlights something else: AI content
should be labelled. It is not always obvious that an AI has produced
a PR.
mmmpetrichor wrote 1 day ago:
I see this on my team. I honestly thought as engineers we'd all
understand the limitations and nuance a bit better. Right now it's
kind of a shit show. In addition to seeing my teammates open huge AI
generated PRs and just asking for review without them having done much
verification, I'm also seeing my teammates (smart ones whom I respect)
use AI to "do code reviews". And we already have automated AI code
reviews added to our PRs. So now I'm sometimes getting hallucinated BS
responses from "human" reviews.
This makes me absolutely SURE that the general public is fucked and
that we're going to start seeing huge AI generated fuckups on a regular
basis. If people in this industry, basically experts compared to the
general public, are misusing this tech in such seemingly obvious ways,
imagine the ways non technical people will misunderstand and misapply
it. Of course, with the help of overhyped BS from everyone hyping and
selling it.
xpct wrote 1 day ago:
Yep, it's bad. It's too easy to press the publish button without
double-checking the outputs. Programming has always been about
discipline, and now it's even more so.
dTal wrote 1 day ago:
I think this is a kind of nerd chauvanism. What I see is that the
general public are deeply skeptical of "AI" in all its forms.
Software "engineers" are especially vulnerable to believing that LLMs
are smart generally, because LLMs are good at writing code, and skill
at writing software is how the software engineer measures the
superiority of their own intelligence. But a poet is in no danger of
over-anthromorphising an LLM.
j16sdiz wrote 1 day ago:
This is extra work on human.
Many artist and content creator is now asked to show the "behind the
scene" or a full session recording, which nobody care enough to check.
This is frustrating and demotivating the artist.
Expect the same demotivating effect on the software contributor.
If you think reading _forwarded_ AI response are cheap, you can run
your own LLM. It is the same amount work on you
koinedad wrote 1 day ago:
Yes
altairprime wrote 1 day ago:
âI forwarded your AIâs email to mine for training and I assume it
will be incorporated into future outputs. Appreciate the inputs!â
arjie wrote 1 day ago:
This is just an old engineering principle of work amplification. For an
input of x you shouldnât routinely do nx. If you do youâll get
flooded. Debounce, throttle, load shed, improve throughput and latency.
Lots of solutions. Just map it to the problem and apply.
In the past you had coworker who produced volumes of code. Same
principle.
Zanni wrote 1 day ago:
This isn't unique to code or AI. In creative writing courses, we were
asked to give thoughtful critiques of (human written) stories and
excerpts, and often I felt as if I were doing more work than the
original author. If you can't be bothered to review your manuscript, or
at least run it through a spellchecker, why should I waste my time on
it?
vermilingua wrote 1 day ago:
> For human code review requests, I always review my AI-generated code
first.
I remember a time in the ancient past (2025 maybe) that your PR was
your responsibility, whether or not you typed it with your meat fingers
or cranked it out of the Giant Plagarism Machine. Itâs absurd to
think that the above quote is now something approaching controversial.
emodendroket wrote 1 day ago:
I use AI as an editor on informational writing all the time and it's
good at pointing out flaws in what I wrote. But I don't really love
reading a document that's obviously in the voice of Claude if you're
asking for my opinion on it. But it kind of depends on the writing --
a change request description, most people are too lazy to do better
than the AI would, and there are other kinds of documentation that
normally just wouldn't get done. But like for a design doc where
you're asking me to pore over it now even though I don't necessarily
get anything out of it it's distasteful when I see phrases that are
obviously from AI.
wnevets wrote 1 day ago:
This has been my rule since the moment generative AI hit the scene. If
you're not willing to put in the effort to create the thing, why should
I put in effort to consume it?
erelong wrote 1 day ago:
> "no"
Sometimes human effort doesm't have to be complicated though (concise
communications)
phyzix5761 wrote 1 day ago:
If the agent does everything for you it means it can do everything for
the next person. At that point you're replaceable and have no value in
your field. Learn things deeply even if you use AI because its the deep
knowledge workers that will keep getting hired.
ElProlactin wrote 1 day ago:
> Learn things deeply even if you use AI because its the deep
knowledge workers that will keep getting hired.
The problem is that this realistically is only applicable and
actionable to a subset of the labor pool, and that subset is
decreasing.
There are a lot of people who discovered that their "deep knowledge"
and "deep skill" wasn't as deep as they thought (read: "deep" enough
to make them irreplaceable to their employer). People are generally
pretty good at overestimating their value.
reverius42 wrote 1 day ago:
Right, like I hope your deep knowledge wasn't something you can
just ask Claude!
matheusmoreira wrote 20 hours 47 min ago:
The depths of knowledge required to beat Claude will only grow
with time. "Deep" knowledge will become everyday normal
knowledge, and will eventually offer no competitive advantage
whatsoever. Continuous education takes a lot of effort and money,
and returns are ever diminishing.
dabinat wrote 1 day ago:
It surprises me how many people have voluntarily relegated their entire
job to LLM Prompter. If your work is indistinguishable from that of a
machine, whatâs to stop your boss cutting out the middleman and using
the machine directly? I would have thought that people would be trying
their hardest to prove their worth in this new world weâre in.
tobyhinloopen wrote 1 day ago:
I actively support âmy bossâ to run Claude Code. I offered them
to help and made jokes itâs so easy these days they might as well
just call Claude Code themselves. Iâve shown I could plop in their
documents of feedback and Claude fixed the issues.
I have worked with non-tech employees to set up Claude to help them
do small tasks. Iâve helped to review and improve completely
vibe-coded projects by such employees.
Iâm not sure what my role will be, but I fully embrace that my
traditional role of writing code is gone.
dTal wrote 1 day ago:
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords...
emodendroket wrote 1 day ago:
Well, if everyone is telling you they want you to adapt AI, then it's
rational to see just how much of your job you can get it to do for
you.
visarga wrote 1 day ago:
It's even worse when everyone around you is using it. How can you
keep up? Companies face the same dilemma: investors, competitors,
and users already use AI and have factored it into their
expectations.
inigyou wrote 22 hours 51 min ago:
AI is supposed to make people 100x more productive. We know it
doesn't because nobody remade Windows in 6 months or Photoshop in
1 month. It's just memorized more common cases, that's all. You
used to not be able to oneshot a three.js game, now you can, but
that's only because it's memorized more three.js games, not
because it's more intelligent.
hypfer wrote 1 day ago:
Keep up with what?
We've already established that most of it is noise. You don't
need to keep up with producing noise.
tonyhart7 wrote 1 day ago:
I don't know man, claude fable literally exceeded my
expectation and its totally not a noise
feels like its becoming reality that we as a human don't need
to this anymore
emodendroket wrote 1 day ago:
Even if there's a lot of noise there's clearly something real
there. People are shipping more working products than was
previously possible, they're debugging faster than was
previously possible, and various other things. I mean you can
go fishing for things to confirm your skepticism if you want
but it's pretty clear to me.
hypfer wrote 1 day ago:
Sure, but that doesn't mean that you can't filter signal from
noise.
So the actual problem statement is not "how do I keep up" but
"how do I correctly tune my filter", which is solvable.
The biggest challenge there I think is that many people are
not prepared for just how sharp and uncompromising that
filter needs to be, but that too is solvable.
emodendroket wrote 1 day ago:
If you're not going to experiment at all you're not going
to be able to do that. Agentic coding was basically a joke
the first time I tried it. Now it isn't.
hypfer wrote 1 day ago:
You seem to be arguing against something I did not say?
moomoo11 wrote 1 day ago:
having worked in tech and now running my own company..
the honest truth is that maybe 10-20% of SWE (at best) are
âgoodâ. sure it is harsh but i won't lie. if you're good you'll
probably relate.
the rest kind of suck.
iâve never gotten anything lower than Exceeds Expectations in my
career so Iâve seen how awful some engineers were. iâve seen how
amazing a tiny minority were and i made them my mentors.
these days i have a simple policy.
if they cannot think, they are fired. why waste resources (time and
money) on someone who canât use their brain? iâd rather give AI
credits to someone who uses their brain.
thinking is the humans job. the ai needs to execute on what the human
thought of, improved, planned.
bandrami wrote 1 day ago:
Everybody talks about finding that mythical 10X but in my recent
hiring experience it's more like there's a whole bunch of 0Xs and
the trick is finding the actual 1Xs among them.
Sohcahtoa82 wrote 20 hours 14 min ago:
Someone else said it on HN a couple years ago...Something about
how there's no such thing as a 10x engineer, but there are a LOT
of 0.1x engineers and a few 2x.
The absolute worst is someone that tries to brand themselves as a
10x engineer by constantly using programming terms like "dynamic
programming", "polymorphism", "recursion" and the like, but
they're really a 0.1x engineer because they don't truly
understand what any of those are and when they should actually be
using them, and so try to shoehorn them in when they don't need
them while also not understanding them, and end up writing
low-quality crap.
Took too long for management to get rid of that guy.
LandR wrote 1 day ago:
This!
All my experience in trying to hire developers has been wading
through an endless stream of people who were just useless.
Me: I want to represent a 2d grid, what data structure should we
use?
Them: A string?
This was someone applying for senior engineer. Others I've had
filled their CV with SQL related acronyms. But couldn't explain
what a foreign key was and then stubbornly insisted that at their
current corp they would never ever use foreign keys in their SQL
database!
I've had senior engineer when asked how to check if we had a 2d
array with an item at x,y tell me if anything is on the same
column or row, they couldn't do it, couldn't even verbalise how
to approach it.
"Web Developers" who didn't know the difference between GET and
POST. Web Developers that have never heard of PUT or what it
would be used for.
bandrami wrote 1 day ago:
I have a question I usually ask which is "How would you convert
a Julian yyyy-ddd date string to a military yyyy-mm-dd date
string?" (I explain how a Julian date works if they aren't
familiar with it.)
The answer that almost guarantees I'll hire you is "there's got
to be a library function for that, so I look in the manual".
Almost as good is somebody whiteboarding how they'd convert ddd
to mm-dd (and then account for leap years, etc.)
I get a disturbing number of people who say things like "I
would communicate with the person asking for this to see what
they're really intending blah blah"
My favorite answer was on a phone interview where he just hung
up and wouldn't answer when we called back.
rightbyte wrote 18 hours 22 min ago:
> My favorite answer was on a phone interview where he just
hung up and wouldn't answer when we called back.
Heh ... yeah well I wish I had it to do that.
However, you are asking gotcha questions.
nkrisc wrote 1 day ago:
> I get a disturbing number of people who say things like "I
would communicate with the person asking for this to see what
they're really intending blah blah"
Sounds like they know this question is a âgotchaâ
question but just misinterpreted which direction you were
going with it.
Some will ask a question like this expecting you to treat it
like a puzzle and outline how youâd solve it as-is; others
ask it as a way to probe how youâll deal with strange or
misguided requests (the case you noted as disturbing); and
others yet will ask it to see how youâd practically solve
it (your intention).
Seems like a bad interview question without context regarding
kind of answer youâre looking for.
bandrami wrote 1 day ago:
No, it's a pretty good interview question because it tells
me if somebody's instinct is to reinvent the wheel or not.
What I didn't expect was how many people couldn't say how a
wheel even works.
nkrisc wrote 23 hours 1 min ago:
But that's why the context of the question is important.
It's not clear from your comment, but I'd give a
different answer if the question was strictly academic in
nature (reinventing the wheel) or focused on practical
work realities (use a library).
inigyou wrote 22 hours 49 min ago:
Even using a library isn't that practical. It may be
the zeitgeist in JavaScript but that doesn't mean it's
actually a good idea. Nobody remembers left-pad? If
you're writing Java or Python then checking if your
date class can already do it is a good idea.
bandrami wrote 13 hours 26 min ago:
I've managed to work in tech for 30 years without
ever significantly coming into contact with
javascript professionally. I hire Ada and C
programmers for a stodgy defense contractor where we
have to wear ties and it takes 6 months to get a new
library approved; unicorns don't really thrive in
this environment (or in Fairfax County in general).
vouwfietsman wrote 1 day ago:
Its not. Any interview question where you are looking for
a specific answer is already suspect, but especially if
you don't properly provide context for the question in
what you would expect, things become a shit show.
If you would ask someone to write a piece of code, and a
part of the problem is this conversion, then you would be
right to expect they reach for a library, but even if
they don't you would be giving them the opportunity to
explain themselves, and judge the explanation, not the
answer. Also, if your test is "does this person reach for
a library at the right time", you could do a lot less
esoteric and confusing by just asking them to add 10 days
to a date. If you just ask this one specific problem, it
is likely they assume you are looking for them to
demonstrate the skills involved in actually solving the
problem, i.e. leetcode.
This is also why some people give you the blabla answer,
because it is indeed very unlikely that someone needs to
do this legitimately. This is because its a toy problem.
Someone's professional reaction to the problem in
isolation should indeed be: this is weird, I've never
been asked something like this, what's up?
Finally, even though the question is terrible, I would
still rate the "whatsup?" response higher than the
"leapyear" response. I would want a developer to triple
check that this problem needs solving, before they would
solve it themselves.
Finally finally, if there's one answer to one question
that, when answered trivially in a way literally taught
in most basic programming courses (use the standard
library / a third party library), makes them a
"guaranteed hire", I also have significant doubts about
the level of talent you are bringing in, as any
experienced interviewer will tell you that qualified
people will get important questions wrong, and
unqualified people will get important questions right.
I understand that this reaction might be quite harsh, and
I know better than anyone that its hard and time
consuming to do good interviews, but please consider that
you are rejecting people who may be very confused and sad
by this way of rejection.
firmretention wrote 1 day ago:
People are not generally answering interview questions
based on instinct, but rather based on what they think
the interviewer wants to hear to get the job. I would
have interpreted this is as a leetcode style algo
question and started by treating it as such, even though
IRL my first instinct would be "get a lib that does it".
Awful, awful strategy.
bandrami wrote 23 hours 23 min ago:
Nope, not remotely awful. I've made great hires from
it, which is its point.
bluGill wrote 23 hours 48 min ago:
It appears that either answer would be accepted, and so
I'm fine with it. If it really is there is one correct
answer then I'm against this. This feels like a
problem where a good enough solution can be done in the
time of an interview if you do it by hand (though if
anyone knows about dates they will expect there is a
lifetime of fixing special cases left if you don't use
the library)
I prefer fizz-buzz as a question because it is obvious
there isn't a library. It is also a problem you should
be able to do in an interview. It has enough weirdness
that there is no best answer, despite having several
workable paths you could try.
bandrami wrote 10 hours 50 min ago:
I mean, any answer is "accepted" in the sense that
the whole point is to let me see how you think about
solving simple problems. What has been distressing is
seeing the number of applicants who can't even try,
when it's the trying I want to see.
bluGill wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
It is shocking how often there is one acceptable
correct answer and they don't care about the
approach to solving problems only the score in a
pass fail way.
Ekaros wrote 1 day ago:
Also now is it 1x in individual productivity or >=1x in team
productivity. As anyone multiplying teams productivity by less
than one is bad. Probably lot worse than actual 0x.
Someone who produces absolutely nothing and have no impact has
cost, but is still better than someone who produces net negative.
And the people who solely act as interface between LLM and
whatever might fall to later category.
satvikpendem wrote 1 day ago:
It's the Pareto principle of course, as well as the normal
distribution. Many firms have been able to succeed in the market
just by hiring only good engineers over average ones.
moomoo11 wrote 1 day ago:
yeah but these days it is even more important to filter out bads
and even at "good" companies you have people who can game the
system to get in, and then they struggle to get anything done on
time or be responsible for taking on and completing any
initiatives bigger than a single task on a bigger scope.
satvikpendem wrote 1 day ago:
Indeed. You really need to find people who don't want to play
politics and instead get stuff done. I'm still not sure how to
hire for these sorts of people in the age of AI, where people
even cheat in interviews. Maybe probation programs? Have
multiple people work for a month or two and cut those who don't
succeed.
moomoo11 wrote 1 day ago:
this is what I've been doing, and obviously I have a startup
so I need to double-ensure that I don't onboard any bads. you
can start people off as contractors too.
I still think a single in person LC style (doesn't have to be
LC per se, could be domain specific) logical
thinking/reasoning exercise is useful. I want to ensure the
person can actually put 2 and 2 together and think. This is
just a fast filter.
If they seem like they can think, then I like to do 2-3
systems design interviews. I'll try to give them something
related to things I like, such as graph structures, writing a
complex query that needs to be dynamically generated, or
something related to infrastructure or how they'd do
something that I've already done. After all, this is MY
project they're joining.
So far that has worked well.
Few more things -
I like to test if they are a humble type (they can work on a
team putting ego on the side - the mission is our number 1
priority). if they say they know something that i know and
asked, then they can be sure I'm going to drill them on it.
if it turns out they lied, i'm not wasting more time. Thanks
for your time, take care. This is very important to me. Just
say you don't know, it isn't a big deal because ever since
like 1994 that has not been an issue. You can just learn
things online, and AI makes that even faster. I am never
afraid to say I don't know something, and I've asked plenty
of "dumb" questions (while doing some due diligence first) so
I don't really mind.
Can they handle information overload? I am the type of person
who has multiple branches in my head of actions I can take
next, so while I may appear stressed I'm really not. Can they
keep up? Our goal as software engineers should be to come up
with solutions that solve the problem in a way that makes
building on it simpler in the future. My goal is simplicity
and effectiveness. So I'll see if they can keep up, and
eventually reduce the work to be done into atomic pieces.
This is a fun exercise because it is collaborative and we get
to bounce ideas fast back and forth.
Finally, I like to let them use their favorite tools,
including AI tools (codex, claude, some ppl have esoteric
custom stuff which is cool), to solve a problem together. It
might be code related, it might not. Really depends on my
mood. I like to see how they work and what sort of output
they can come up with. This filters out people who only ask
AI stuff, instead of having some framework they've already
developed to be effective.
Honestly I don't know how to scale this process. I'm not
really going to feel bad either about firing fast, ultimately
this is a business and I don't want customers to suffer
because we have some issues internally.
At the same time, I wonder if I even need to build out an org
with 100s of people. That was an inefficiency (look at all
the layoffs), and it is traumatic.
If I can find a few great people who can be supercharged and
turbocharged and electrified with AI, then they can take on &
own bigger responsibilities. My number 1 goal is to ensure
they're with me on the mission, and after that all things
seem to sort of fit into place.
discreteevent wrote 1 day ago:
Firing fast works both ways. If I joined your company and I
thought you fired someone too fast I would leave, not
because I might get fired, but because I've seen where that
kind of leadership takes things.
moomoo11 wrote 1 day ago:
thats fine you can leave. itâs probably for the best
for us. thatâs why the mission is so important and
requires a great filter.
mass effect 2 is my favorite game ever. it is all about
putting together the team, and ensuring you work with
each one of them to get their whole loyalty.
each member is a badass, in their own regard. itâs also
a video game and itâs linear unlike real life. but the
mission is super important to me.
and when others have their own passions they want to
express and carry out via fulfilling the mission,
thatâs super key imo.
so far itâs worked out fine. people get the fast firing
thing. they know if someone isnât onboard with carrying
out the mission they also donât want to be burdened.
like we are seriously helping people in an underserved
industry. itâs insane.
i hate working with mids and bads, they are going to
bring everyone else down. so i want to work with the best
people i can get. they donât need to be MIT grads paper
weight types. they just need to be mission oriented and
focused.
justanotherjoe wrote 1 day ago:
Might not be solveable. At some point the effort in
finding that someone might be larger than the benefit you
get from just using the second, third, fourth best. Or
using some flawed approximation hiring mechanism. There's
just so much noise now. And it hits the good job seekers
too.
analog8374 wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe this is why generative art never really took off.
That said, roguelikes are awesome. So there is definitely a place for
simulated effort.
card_zero wrote 1 day ago:
Real effort, surely? Simulated reward.
satvikpendem wrote 1 day ago:
It did in many corners, there are some interesting designs on
r/stablediffusion, and regular people too are using them to make
posters and invitation cards for example.
egypturnash wrote 1 day ago:
If "putting a random seed into a set of swappable character parts"
counts as "generative art" then it sure made a ton of money when
people cared about hying NFTs.
seriocomic wrote 1 day ago:
can't believe meatfingers.com has been registered (dormant)...
schyzomaniac wrote 1 day ago:
Related - this was posted in march:
HTML [1]: https://stopsloppypasta.ai/en/
morpheos137 wrote 1 day ago:
My opinion is there is a category error in the discourse on AI. It
treats ai assisted output as other than human. AI is a human tool. AI
output is human output.
miqkt wrote 1 day ago:
Love the principle, preach!
I think I've been following this subconsciously as LLM artifacts
reached some threshold of pervasiveness across the work I do. If I can
sense (maybe eventually I won't be able to because of how capable the
technology becomes?) that what I'm reading is wholly regurgitated out
by an LLM, I automatically care less and feel inclined to respond in
kind by generating an artificial response in return.
zetanor wrote 1 day ago:
What I find strange is how rarely LLM output is distributed alongside
the LLM input, especially outside of code repos. Why can't I rerun the
prompt that resulted in your work next year, when models have gotten
better? Are people ashamed of their prompts? Ashamed of having used AI?
i unno
Prompt used to generate this message: "Create a comment for Hacker News
which bemoans the lack of AI prompts being shared with the stuff it
creates. Speculate on the reasons and create a call for engagement. Use
quantum hyperthinking. End with a typo to prove your humanity."
threetonesun wrote 23 hours 39 min ago:
Most of my AI usage amounts to "read this ticket and do the work",
the ticket documents the requirements, a better model could, I
suppose, do a better job?
Enzime wrote 1 day ago:
I think this is a gap in the tooling (Git, VCS, and forges) and the
Zed people are working on this
HTML [1]: https://zed.dev/blog/introducing-deltadb
esperent wrote 1 day ago:
> Why can't I rerun the prompt that resulted in your work next year,
when models have gotten better?
Because you could also just point the better model at the generated
code and tell it to improve it, so why save the prompt too?
Zambyte wrote 1 day ago:
Because improving a high schoolers project is probably not as good
of an idea as giving the original task to a senior engineer.
bluGill wrote 23 hours 45 min ago:
If the high school project has been improved by many engineers
over a few years it likely is complex enough that a senior
engineer cannot rewrite it for a reasonable cost. It isn't clear
if next years models will be enough better that they can rewrite
it for a reasonable cost. If they are they can probably extract
the requirements and special cases from the code.
Zambyte wrote 23 hours 27 min ago:
Following my analogy, the high school project would have been
continuously extended by high schoolers passing the project on
from class to class each year, rather than "improved by many
engineers". The "engineers" (future models) don't get the
project until currently models have had their way for a while.
I think that makes the "rewrite from scratch" plan a whole lot
more compelling.
esperent wrote 14 hours 52 min ago:
It's a bad analogy. Say what you will about the strengths and
weaknesses of current LLMs but there's no "high-schoolers"
(outside of rare prodigies) who can write code at the level
of a frontier LLM.
Zambyte wrote 13 hours 34 min ago:
High schoolers are to senior software engineers as current
models are to future models. Is that really so hard to
follow?
carlosjobim wrote 1 day ago:
For your next prompt, tell it to end with a hateful and offensive
tangent to prove its humanity, since LLMs have those "safe guards".
inigyou wrote 22 hours 46 min ago:
I don't know if writing the URL will get me banned but someone had
this idea for licenses at plus.com
beej71 wrote 1 day ago:
FMFL. I'm going to build a paper-based social network where
non-handwriting is prohibited. Like in the 70s.
nosioptar wrote 20 hours 14 min ago:
You should. Then I could start my SHWAAS business offering
unbreakable encryption for it.
(Shitty Handwriting As A Service).
satvikpendem wrote 1 day ago:
There are handwriting physical bots too, or even AI image
generators for "handwritten" text.
pixlmint wrote 1 day ago:
Yup, I always phrased this as âif you canât be arsed to write it, I
wonât read itâ
thaumasiotes wrote 1 day ago:
This headline has been seeing some popularity. But it's never made any
sense. This is just the labor theory of value, applied to documents.
The labor theory of value doesn't work for documents any more than it
works for anything else. If I do something that's easy for me, and it's
valuable to you, you'll still want it. If I do something that's
difficult for me, it will be less valuable to you, because the
difficulty I have with it implies that what I produce will be of lower
quality.
This is all equally true of automatically-generated documents. If
they're valuable, people will want to read them. Whether it was
unpleasant for someone to create them isn't a factor.
So where is this slogan coming from? Are people just afraid to admit
that the documents they're getting are valueless?
Finnucane wrote 21 hours 16 min ago:
If you get a document from someone and they say "I have no idea if
this has any value and I couldn't be arsed to check," it's not
unreasonable to presume that it probably has no value.
DanielHB wrote 1 day ago:
I think the point is that automatically-generated documents by LLM is
lower quality the manually-generated ones or at least guaranteed
lower quality than automatically-generated + manually-reviewed.
Therefor if you are not putting human effort on the document it is
low-value.
We have seen this before when big data started to be a thing, tons
and tons of reports being auto-produced weekly (or even daily), but
even if they contain relevant information they are low-value because
no one can take action on so much information.
thaumasiotes wrote 16 hours 43 min ago:
> Therefor if you are not putting human effort on the document it
is low-value.
That's true. The document is low-value.
Asking people to put in personal effort isn't going to change that.
If they comply, the document they produce will still be worthless,
and you still won't want it.
You're diagnosing a problem unrelated to the problem you actually
face.
Aldipower wrote 1 day ago:
I am offering a product (via MCP) that interacts with LLMs and user
data. Every single day I get user support emails to my inbox written
by their LLMs with LLM hallucinations. If the user (a human) would
have read them before, that would save me a lot of time and anger!
Your post sounds logical at the first glance, but has nothing to do
with the reality. The topic title is totally on point! If the user
would put human effort in it, I wouldn't get those crappy emails.
rodonn wrote 1 day ago:
The problem is that I don't know before I read a doc whether or not
it will be useful and valuable.
If someone wants me to spend my time and attention on something they
have shared, I would like them to demonstrate that they put a
proportionate amount of time and effort into its production.
thaumasiotes wrote 1 day ago:
> If someone wants me to spend my time and attention on something
they have shared, I would like them to demonstrate that they put a
proportionate amount of time and effort into its production.
First: why? How does that help you?
Second: Is that actually true? Do you ever watch videos that a
friend recommends to you? Even if the amount of time and effort
your friend put into producing that video is zero? Do you ever read
anything that a friend recommends? Even if they didn't write it?
How much time and effort, in your estimation, did jjfoooo4 put into
producing this article on tombedor.dev?
rDr4g0n wrote 1 day ago:
around my workplace we say if you're copy/pasting llm output, you're
indicating an llm can do your job.
jmyeet wrote 1 day ago:
Obligatory Silicon Valley reference [1].
So this post is talking about at work but I think the principle goes
well beyond that. Think of all the AI chatbots you have to deal with to
get through to customer service at a company. Or get through ATS
systems in hiring. If it isn't already the case, this will probably
replace or supplement TAs marking assignments.
The problem is that AI makes these interactions too cheap for the party
that already has disproportionate power. The cost for them to add
another layer, another hurdle, another set of questions, etc is
essentially zero. Yet everyone who wants to get through that system has
to pay in a human cost.
I just thought of another good example. In the pandemic auditions in
Hollywood went virtual for obvious reasons. But this never went away.
Now, you might say it's convenient to not have to spend hours driving
to Burbank for a 5 minute audition but anecdotally the taped audition
seems to be much more work. It requires a lot of prep and more tech for
good sound and audio. There are people who help people tape auditions,
which has really just added another layer. Plus, instead of only
locals, anyone anywhere can submit an audition so where you might've
had 30 people previously, now you have 150.
And what happens to those profesionally-produced auditions? They get
submitted and the casting director might pick 5 randomly to even look
at. If there isn't already, there will also be an AI system that
filters those auditions.
At least previously you got 5 minutes of actual time from a casting
director, the actual director, etc. So it's actually way more
inefficient for you now. Plus, if you're lucky enough to be looked at
and they like you, you probably have to go for an in-person audition
anyway so what's happened here? You've just added another layer and way
more work.
Companies think they're "winning" here by saving labor but I think
that's short-sighted. What'll end up happening is AI agents will rise
to help people on the other side of that. You can think of using AI to
cheat on school assignments as an example of that.
So what will we end up with? AI agents inundating AI systems, which
just adds a whole bunch of inefficiency.
[1]
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1gFSENorEY
niuzeta wrote 1 day ago:
A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the
team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is
his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed,
languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself -
_intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy
for the team to look at.
This single headline perfectly captures what I have been thinking. It's
not that I reject AI content, but it takes _effort_ to review and weed
out any mistakes. When your thoughtful reviews that take an
hour(because the PR is typically large, and you want to be _right_ when
you're pointing out a hallucination) gets an AI-generated response with
AI-generated amendments, It doesn't feel _nice_. I feel dismissed and
it has continuously trained me to subconsciously avoid his PRs. After
all, the team is fully onboarded with AI, so it's not like there is a
lack of PRs to review.
It looks like the sentiment isn't just isolated for me.
jjice wrote 22 hours 45 min ago:
> About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup
that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention
What irks me the most with this new trend is when people don't review
the code themselves thoroughly enough and you're pointing out obvious
flaws that you know that they should be aware of. LLMs can be such a
great tool, but it's unfair to make people review your code before
you've even seemingly looked at it yourself.
xpct wrote 23 hours 57 min ago:
I think we're too nice sometimes. If a coworker has been sending
stuff to review that's taking me more time than for them to create,
surely that's an opportunity to discuss this?
Roark66 wrote 1 day ago:
I improved a similar issue by writing custom instructions for copilot
that give it enough context to do PR reviews that are only 30% BS.
I asked other team members to run my custom instructions to perform a
review with copilot before they submit...
Of course no one is doing it. It looks like the PRs I get are still
straight from copilot. So I tend to run my review prompt. Cut out the
30% BS issues it "finds" and the rest is good.
AJRF wrote 1 day ago:
I wonder if there is a tool that could equally waste their time. Like
the worlds most pedantic code review bot that just gets the PR
raising bot to spin wheels forever.
That might teach those people a lesson.
swiftcoder wrote 1 day ago:
As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were
a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code
review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to
agents.
And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for
human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end
tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that
place meaningful guardrails on LLMs, and help them maintain a
reasonable quality bar.
iovrthoughtthis wrote 3 hours 31 min ago:
Code review should be a separate function
WalterBright wrote 11 hours 14 min ago:
I had one contributor who would submit hundreds of lines of
disconnected changes. One of his PRs was isolated as being the
source of the bug.
After some hours of work, I discovered that his actual semantic
change was one line of code, and was the source of the bug. The
rest was just reshuffling code around with no apparent purpose.
At a recent meeting, the agenda was generated by LLM. About 20% of
the action items were hallucinations.
anthuswilliams wrote 19 hours 38 min ago:
I have been championing this mindset since well before LLMs. It is
an admittedly controversial opinion, but one I hold strongly.
Code reviews are a productivity tax. No truly effective team would
rely on them. The fact that so many software teams view them as
indispensable just shows how few effective software teams there are
in our industry.
They are akin to a quality check step in manufacturing. Part of
what Deming did in revolutionizing manufacturing was eliminating
the step in favor of a holistic quality metric owned by all
participants and enforced with rigorous statistical process
controls. As you say, we in the software industry have all the
pieces (autoformatters, tests, benchmarks, etc) to operate this
way, but it seems our organizational and management dynamics combat
this shift at every turn.
Relevant: When this conversation comes up at work, I like to share
Avery Pennarun's post about the review tax:
HTML [1]: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20260316
bobsomers wrote 18 hours 29 min ago:
> owned by all participants
How does this work in practice? In my experience, any metrics
owned by a group inevitably languish and are largely ignored.
Anything you want to improve needs a DRI.
anthuswilliams wrote 15 hours 33 min ago:
You still have a DRI. In factories this would be a foreman; in
software teams this could be a team lead or product owner or
whatever. Their job is to apply the statistical process
controls and the gemba walk, to help the team see the problems
and develop the causal mental model for why the problems
happen. They hold the team responsible, together, for
combatting the issues so uncovered. They know who is not
pulling their weight.
Of course, to do that, a business, and in turn the DRI, would
have to empower the team to act in its business's best interest
and stop micromanaging them.
epage wrote 22 hours 41 min ago:
As a prolific PR author, I've found how I communicate has a major
factor on how well and quickly people respond to PRs. I've recorded
my lessons at [1] .
HTML [1]: https://epage.github.io/dev/pr-style/
coldtea wrote 1 day ago:
>As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs
were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept.
Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans
Prolific humans should scale to the review/test/QA/staging
backpressure - not just push to have whatever they produce
accepted.
Prolific is not a badge of honor, and "lines of code" is not a
quality metric.
ozim wrote 19 min ago:
Questions arise like, maybe instead of doing 4x PRs he could to
2x more code reviews and 2x more PRs still or even doing 3x more
reviews. Why parent poster didnât write anything about his
involvement in reviewing the code - could he be just asshole team
member ?
teiferer wrote 1 day ago:
> Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans
If that's genuinely your attitude then your org has a problem.
Code review is slow and less fun, for the average sw eng. But for
high quality work it's indispensable. So treat code reviews as a
scarce resource. Optimize for code reviewer time and attention.
Have your PRs the right size? Are they well described? Do you give
context? Do they fit in the bigger story? Do you mix in unrelated
drive-by fixes? How easy is it to deal with you once you have
received comments? Do you address them promptly? Do you give your
reviewers credit (if not praise) for their help? Do you give back
by doing code reviews yourself with high quality feedback? There
are lot of things you can do to streamline things and give code
reviews the place in a teams workflow that it deserves.
necovek wrote 21 hours 42 min ago:
I agree about how you can reciprocate for a good code review, but
I'd just add that for me, code review is also fun â when done
for a fellow human who I might be teaching.
It is definitely very grunt-like for an LLM.
jt2190 wrote 1 day ago:
> But for high quality work [a code review is] indispensable.
The argument here is that all code reviews are done with
attention and care, but quality of a code review is highly
dependent on the reviewer and the teamâs review process, and in
the real world the quality of reviews pretty much follow the same
distribution curve as, say, agile project management: For the
time invested in reviewing, a handful of teams get excellent
utility from them, most teams get little benefit, and a sad few
actually cause harm.
If most code reviews provide only a little benefit at base for
most teams, recommending that most teams should also delay
shipping quality work is going to sound a lot like bad advice.
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
Most orgs have a problem with quality unless it is enforced by
government requirements for certifications and such.
Code reviews, documentation, static analysis, only retrieving
deps from internal repos, unit tests, integration tests, ....
Especially in domains where shipping software is not the main
product, and a plain cost center to the main business of physical
goods.
fg137 wrote 1 day ago:
It's clear they consider code review a personal activity than
team activity, in the sense that they think "code review is a
gate before my code can be merged" rather than "code review is a
process where the team discusses, understands and improves the
code".
And that's not rare in teams. Lots of teams and developers do
code review wrong.
I even hear other people complain that I "block" their code
review. I mean, if there are issues in your code, of course I am
going to flag them, what do you think the purpose of code review
is?
swiftcoder wrote 1 day ago:
> Lots of teams and developers do code review wrong
In this sense, I'm not sure I've ever seen a team that does
codereview "right".
In the before times, most PR feedback was stylistic, with the
occasional bug identified. Now that we have ubiquitous
auto-formatters/linters/CI, most PR review falls into either
"you misunderstood the spec", or "I disagree with your
architectural choices" - and my personal feeling is that your
process ought to catch both of those well before the PR stage
thi2 wrote 19 hours 58 min ago:
Not my experience and especially for juniors reviews were an
excellent tool to learn and get mentored.
necovek wrote 21 hours 45 min ago:
How many teams did you see?
On your original claim, I have seen engineers put up 5x more
PRs simply because they paid less attention to the quality or
put less thought on each one of them.
I have seen people put up 5x more quality PRs too. But as
long as they follow the good practice of doing a code review
for every PR they put up (or 2 if you require 2 per PR), they
got their stuff through quickly as well.
> your process ought to catch both of those well before the
PR stage
We have multiple points where mistakes of any sort can be
caught, and code review is one of them.
Yes, most architectural issues should be caught earlier, but
some will only become evident in code: some by the dev
themselves, others by reviewers.
This is only a problem if you mostly catch architecture
issues at code review phase.
fg137 wrote 1 day ago:
> most PR feedback was stylistic, with the occasional bug
identified.
I think that only speaks for your own experience. I have
definitely seen more than a few PRs that needed significant
work.
swiftcoder wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, that's fair. I have spent most of my career on
high-pressure teams within FAANG, where we aggressively
managed-out anyone who wasn't making the grade. And now in
the startup world, we apply a very aggressive hiring bar.
I'm not sure how much I'd enjoy working on teams who were
routinely producing PRs that were in bad shape.
bartread wrote 1 day ago:
> Have your PRs the right size?
Iâve noticed that large PRs arenât just a problem for human
reviewers: theyâre a problem for AI reviewers too.
If I submit a 100 line PR Iâm likely to get some useful
comments back from both humans and LLMs. In fact the LLM is
likely to come back with so much feedback it gets down to the
nitpicky/annoying level.
If I submit 1000+ lines in my PR, the humans either donât have
time and/or get scrolling blindness, and the AI reviewer is
likely to give me a response that amounts to, â<> Looks good to
me bro: ship it!â
I guess they have a limited token budget for reviews so you can
bamboozle them simply by blowing most or all of that budget.
swiftcoder wrote 1 day ago:
The flip side of this tends to be that if 1,000 lines of code
need to happen, filling the review queue up with 10x PRs each
of 100 lines isn't exactly great either. The author spends a
bunch of extra effort producing a raft of atomic PRs, and the
reviewers get to context-switch a whole bunch (and may not end
up with a clear picture of the feature end-to-end).
I think the ultimate answer to this is a stacked PR workflow
(which we had at Meta), where I can cheaply maintain/review a
1,000 line PR as a stack of 10 incremental PRs. But
unfortunately GitHub et al are still not quite there on this
one.
meindnoch wrote 1 day ago:
Well, it's either:
1. Your skills are >2 standard deviations above everyone else's.
2. You're fast at producing a lot of half-baked garbage, and your
coworkers are too shy to confront you, so they just try to ignore
it.
(one of these scenarios is much more likely)
neogodless wrote 1 day ago:
As someone who often submits significantly more PRs (without
using AI) than teammates, it's not exactly a skill delta. Yes
that helps but it's often only a piece of the puzzle. The other
ingredients include motivations and culture. In such cases,
something else is the driving force, such as posturing for
promotion, stability, etc. My current team is massively low
performing. Management pays some lip service to all the problems,
but also runs things in a way that discourages high performance.
It's not a good fit for me, as I want to tackle challenges head
on, improve the environment, be productive, embrace change. I'm
also very comfortable with the code base as well as the code
review process, but I'm surrounded by "seniors" who do not know
how to code review, and who are happy to drag their feet and spin
their wheels for months before pushing out small PRs that hurt my
brain. How can that little work be shown after months, barely
functional at best?
We had better management for a few months, and many on the team
were actually quickly closing the skill gap with me, but we had
another shuffle and things are stupid once more.
So I'd offer that's option 3. (There's always a third option to
any suggested either-or fallacy.)
whstl wrote 1 day ago:
It could also potentially be that GP is making atomic PRs, while
everyone else is just making 5000-line PRs with multiple
responsibilities that just gets merged with "LGTM".
But of course HN has to with the most uncharitable
interpretation.
swiftcoder wrote 1 day ago:
Are PRs honestly helping with either case? Either you severely
rate-limit your high-performers, or you drown everyone else in
review, and both outcomes are bad for the overall team
Tade0 wrote 1 day ago:
The latter has an easy fix: the perpetrator is not allowed to
take new work while there are pending review comments left
unaddressed.
neogodless wrote 1 day ago:
By perpetrator you mean the person postponing performing a
code review?
Right? Right?!
Otherwise you place all burden on high performers to not only
push PRs but babysit the rest of the team.
It's not an easy fix, especially with AI letting people
cosplay as high performers.
Tade0 wrote 22 hours 48 min ago:
To make myself clear:
Reviewers have comments which were not addressed by the PR
author - author not allowed to do other work.
No such comments, especially no reviews - author can do
other work.
rightbyte wrote 1 day ago:
> you place all burden on high performers
If their PRs don't get merged they don't perform. It is
trivial to overload your coworkers with secondary tasks due
to your "high performance".
swiftcoder wrote 23 hours 55 min ago:
> If their PRs don't get merged they don't perform. It is
trivial to overload your coworkers with secondary tasks
due to your "high performance".
We're all aware that a huge portion of the busywork that
makes a team successful is not actually reflected in
their upwards-facing deliverables (increasing test
coverage, improving infra, adopting new
tools/methodologies, preemptive security patching, etc).
Your actual high performers, if you have any, are doing
all that stuff in addition to their regularly-scheduled
duties.
If management weren't at least tacitly on board with this
arrangement, your high performers would go work somewhere
else. So my experience is that good managers don't tend
to see this your way.
rightbyte wrote 22 hours 53 min ago:
Yeah I agree. I was trying to makee the point that it
is quite easy to make yourself blocked by others and it
is a deep skill to get other stuff done while blocked
anyway, like say cleanups and tests etc.
swiftcoder wrote 16 hours 20 min ago:
> it is a deep skill to get other stuff done while
blocked anyway, like say cleanups and tests etc.
Which themselves generate more PRs (or larger PRs)...
samiv wrote 1 day ago:
Either you were a head above the rest of the team and had the
intellect to produce high quality value adding work, or then you
were the "move fast break things" type of guy producing a lot of
extra liability and work for others.
PaulKeeble wrote 1 day ago:
I have always considered Kent Beck understood this the best, the
scaling for code reviews as you go to reduced release timeframes is
to pair program, that brings the number of people reviewing it down
but also increases the understanding for the reviewer.
Comprehensive end to end tests are more a replacement for manual
quality assurance for regressions.
I am not sure there is a good analogue for reviews in the AI world.
The human operating the AI should obviously review everything
produced but that is clearly not as good as a second pair of human
MK1 eye balls from pair programming.
skydhash wrote 1 day ago:
No need to pair program, you can always send a message to your
colleague about the design of the upcoming code, especially if
itâs going to impact them or if itâs an area that theyâre
more familiar with. Waiting till a PR for feedback is wrong IMO.
Code review is not for feedback, itâs for ensuring quality
(many eyes on the output) and have a shared involvement in the
evolution of the code. The time for feedback is earlier, once you
have an idea of the solution.
loglog wrote 4 hours 21 min ago:
Writing and reading design documentation can be slower than
pair programming. On the other hand, info about code design
also belongs into inline documentation or commit messages (in
this order of preference), so the effort might not be wasted.
dust-jacket wrote 1 day ago:
> Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans
I've worked with people who consider themselves 'prolific humans'.
Someone always has to tidy upp later, and its never them
Tade0 wrote 1 day ago:
My experience is that it's even worse: they've already produced
enough code that the codebase matches their taste and theirs
alone.
So in essence you have one guy working at 4x and e.g. four other
getting just 0.7x - net effect is still positive, but everyone
save for that one person is miserable.
Mind you, the 4x dev doesn't necessarily have to be particularly
talented - they only need to get their foot in the door before
anyone else.
Back during the ZIRP days you could immediately tell that this is
the case in a team by staff rotation alone. Nowadays people
understandably cling to their jobs, so you might now know until
it's too late.
whstl wrote 1 day ago:
That's such bullshit.
I've managed some incredibly prolific developers and some very
slow ones, and the prolific ones are pretty much always the ones
more available, more willing to fix things, more willing to take
feedback.
And also: they make less mistakes because their skills are sharp.
This anecdote comes to mind: [1] If you have to constantly
rationalize performance differences by demeaning others, this
says more about you than the prolific people.
HTML [1]: https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-qua...
wccrawford wrote 1 day ago:
I've worked with both types. Some prolific devs really do
care, and are just really good at their job.
Others are just trying to get code done, and don't care about
quality. These are the types that are upset that their code
gets rejected because their goal is advancement and money, and
not doing a good job.
FWIW, it's okay to care about both. But if you don't care
about doing a good job, you're going to drive everyone around
you insane.
Prolific bad coders are a bane on the company, and AI is only
going to make them worse.
whstl wrote 1 day ago:
Sure but if PRs get rejected, nobody has to "tidy upp (sic)
later".
That's not prolific, that's just producing slop, with AI
otherwise.
I'm just tired of developers pretending that low output is
some sort of silver bullet for quality, and high-output is
automatic slop. Neither are true. In 99% of cases, low output
doesn't correlate with anything positive. High-output can
naturally go either way, but slop doesn't make one
"prolific".
jagged-chisel wrote 1 day ago:
> ⦠and its never them
IME, itâs because they lack the experience to have the Taste
one develops as a senior engineer. âThis works, and is somewhat
understandableâ is as far as they get. Little to no
understanding of how this solution could fit better in the
codebase.
my-next-account wrote 1 day ago:
There's also those that burn themselves out, and John Carmack!
swiftcoder wrote 1 day ago:
> I've worked with people who consider themselves 'prolific
humans'. Someone always has to tidy upp later, and its never them
I run both infrastructure and security - that means a lot of
relatively self-contained PRs to infrastructure-as-code and
dependency management systems. I'm also the team lead, which
makes me responsible for a lot of throwaway prototyping, as well
as cleaning up anyone else's mess...
Yes, the prolific-but-damaging engineers are all too common in
corporate. But particularly in startup land, you tend to find
your high-performers wearing a lot of hats at once.
throwaw12 wrote 1 day ago:
> Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't
scale to agents.
Then don't review the code. Ask Agents to review and merge it, also
shift the responsibilities to the AI agents as well.
If you think human is a bottleneck, then either optimize for
humans, or remove humans. What's the problem?
SkiFire13 wrote 1 hour 32 min ago:
> also shift the responsibilities to the AI agents as well
That's not gonna fly most of the time.
swiftcoder wrote 1 day ago:
> If you think human is a bottleneck, then either optimize for
humans, or remove humans. What's the problem?
Sadly, in my case, it is the auditor. Our SOC2 documents have
this lovely "every change has been reviewed by at least one other
human", and it's going to be a fun battle to get that reworded
loglog wrote 4 hours 12 min ago:
Bureaucracy gives you leverage against slop. Review seriously,
but limit the time that you spend. This will stall the slop.
When the culprit complains, tell your boss "I spend X hours per
week on reviews. If you need more throughput, the PRs quality
needs to improve."
wccrawford wrote 1 day ago:
I think the "and merge it" is the problem in the above comment.
If a coworker is creating a ton of AI-made PRs, I think the
first step should always be to run an AI against them with the
"assume this is low quality code and find all problems, big and
small" text that was suggested in a comment here, and let that
be the first line of defense.
To keep the dev on their toes, each dev should come up with
their own prompt for AI PR review and they can switch off who
reviews it each time, until there are no problems remaining.
Then a human can start to review it.
It will quickly show the low quality code being produced and
the massive waste of time it is for everyone, not to mention
all the money spent on tokens for the whole process.
Or it'll work, and everyone will have their way, and only have
to review code that's pretty decent.
throwaw12 wrote 23 hours 19 min ago:
You have some assumptions here
> first step should always be to run an AI against them
What if they write an agent which takes the feedback and
resolves them with a new commit. Which again didn't do
anything other than offloading more to humans who are
reviewing.
> each dev should come up with their own prompt for AI PR
review and they can switch off who reviews it each time,
until there are no problems remaining.
This assumes AI reviews are correct most of the time, if so,
why do we need even humans. Why not have repository level
code reviewer which is run immediately after code has been
created?
regardless of where you move it, there is still a bottleneck:
humans.
If you don't remove them, you will just pass the ball between
agents and at the end of the day human still needs to review
it.
throwaw12 wrote 1 day ago:
> Sadly, in my case, it is the auditor.
Change your auditor and compliance, SOC2 is created for a trust
between organizations employing humans, if you think agents can
own the things, lead the way, introduce a new compliance, if
companies sign up for it, then you will be the first who is
removing the human bottleneck.
meta_gunslinger wrote 1 day ago:
Comprehensive end-to-end tests and CI can only attest to
correctness, most engineers worth their salt won't review code only
in regards to that aspect though.
swiftcoder wrote 1 day ago:
In the bad old days before auto-formatters and linters, PRs were
heavily used to enforce style guidelines. If we can enforce both
style and correctness in our CI pipeline, what is actually left?
necovek wrote 21 hours 15 min ago:
As said already: readability and maintainability of the code
(closely related) are two most important values a code review
can get you.
meta_gunslinger wrote 23 hours 56 min ago:
The functionally correct code could be rejected in PR for many
reasons other than style:
1. Solution under-engineered/over-engineered.
2. Code is hard to read or comprehend.
3. Design/Archtecture lacking.
4. Principles decided upon by team not adhered to.
These are just some of the reasons I've rejected functionally
correct code before.
To summarize, in any software engineering course you learn that
there are other metrics used to evaluate code other than
correctness (maintainability, readability, scalability,
portability, efficiency etc.)
rplnt wrote 1 day ago:
If the correctness check was vibecoded there's a good chance it
was cheated. So maybe that, on top of the, you know, code
review (see the sibling comment).
While PRs may have been used to correct style, that shouldn't
have been their only or even main purpose. That's on whoever
was using it that way, not on the concept of reviews.
KptMarchewa wrote 1 day ago:
vibe check
skydhash wrote 1 day ago:
Code architecture and technical design. You can have a solution
that works fine, but are too complex or will impede future
changes. Maybe you have code that has already been solved or
your variablesâ name are too generic. Maybe your modules are
messy and your data structures are not modeled well.
jvanderbot wrote 1 day ago:
Gently, as long as you work with humans, you should consider
yourself working _for_ those humans. Everyone needs shared state to
work from, and that's just the cost of doing business.
That said, sometimes low-trust environments are the issue, not PRs.
In a higher trust environment, PR review is a helpful thing you
usually desire, not dread.
swiftcoder wrote 1 day ago:
> In a higher trust environment, PR review is a helpful thing you
usually desire, not dread
Respectfully, in a high-trust environment, feedback should be
delivered well before the PR stage. If you've let someone write a
whole bunch of code without having a shared understanding of how
the solution should work, you may have earlier process issues
that PRs are papering over
necovek wrote 21 hours 31 min ago:
A discussion ahead of the implementation can also bias the two
parties to that discussion and have them overlook the same
implementation issue: many things you only understand once you
start implementing.
If you have these parties review each other's code, I agree
that rarely brings much value.
I think the best way to understand our experience with reviews
is to stop and say: in a few sentences, what do you expect out
of a quality code review? (sounds like nothing in your case,
but I am curious)
swiftcoder wrote 16 hours 24 min ago:
> in a few sentences, what do you expect out of a quality
code review? (sounds like nothing in your case, but I am
curious)
From my perspective, there are three sorts of PRs:
- One is very close to the final form of a particular change,
and any feedback you get at that late stage is indicative of
holes in your process.
- Another is one where someone throws something up and says
"hey, this is an experiment, can I get feedback on the
approach". This is great, the parameters are clear, not much
to say about these.
- The 3rd sort is someone making a trivial 5-line patch to a
makefile/cargo.toml/github workflow/etc. These add basically
no value to anyone.
Of those only the 2nd type really brings much value, and
those are the ones that folks would keep posting even if you
didn't require PRs (since they have an actual question, or a
cool thing to show off).
I'll also note that this only really negatively impacts small
remote teams, because on a sufficiently large, co-located
team, you just ask your buddy one desk over to rubber stamp
all the trivial commits...
necovek wrote 8 hours 18 min ago:
On the first category, what is a process you use which has
no "holes" in it?
Does everybody produce completely readable, tested code
every time? Perhaps that's just "style" to you when it is
"maintainability" to me?
IshKebab wrote 23 hours 14 min ago:
Depends on the change. Certainly most PRs don't need feedback
before the PR is ready - the task is too obvious, and there's
little to feed back on before there's any code.
For bigger changes, of course you need feedback on designs. But
that could easily be in the form of draft PRs.
I definitely would push back on anything that required feedback
before PRs. That's way too much process. Just going to slow you
down for no benefit.
rplnt wrote 1 day ago:
You cannot deliver feedback on something that doesn't exist. If
you mean a review in the style of "all of this is wrong and
needs to be rewritten differently" then yes, that's something
to be discussed beforehand. But I don't imagine this is what
people think of when discussing a review.
teiferer wrote 1 day ago:
Agreed. But those things are not mutually exclusive.
jonahx wrote 1 day ago:
Depends on how PRs function within teams. For some, the PR is
a lightweight thing that is the preferred method of
communication. It sounds like you are imagining a case where
face to face communication, or communication over chat, is
preferred for early stages, with the PR being a nearly final
artifact. But it doesn't have to work like that.
swiftcoder wrote 1 day ago:
I think that's a valuable point. Especially as LLMs bring the
cost of prototyping down (and reduce emotional investment in
code written), it may be more viable to use PRs as
proposals/sketches of a solution.
With human reviewers, I find that by the time someone has
churned out enough of a solution to post a PR, they are
already quite invested in specifics of the solution, and it
makes it emotionally costly (to both author and reviewer)
when someone says "hey, I'm not a fan of this whole approach,
lets start over and do it this other way"
necovek wrote 21 hours 24 min ago:
I have seen many a PR where it is obvious it is an
exploratory work: eg. figuring out how to use an external
dependency that is imperfectly or incorrectly documented,
etc. (You can claim this should be done ahead of time, but
experience tells me you need to code it to learn it)
The emotional toll there is real, but this is exactly the
moment when you expose the knowledge of that external
dependency to the unbiased party that is the reviewer.
I like combining approvals to satisfy the urge for
completion and closure, with a request for fast-follow
refactor to better match the newly discovered model of
interaction. (The worst code review experience I have seen
is when a reviewer accepts it as-is and does a fast follow
refactor themselves, depriving the author of the
opportunity to learn and remain an expert in that area)
jvanderbot wrote 1 day ago:
Agree. All the subtleties of how a high trust environment work
are hard to enumerate
andai wrote 1 day ago:
I often hear people say lately, "why should I bother to read this, if
you didn't even think it was worth writing?"
I've been thinking about this in art. Is it the end result that
matters, or the process of creating it?
I once saw a hideous sculpture. Didn't like it at all. Then the video
zoomed and I saw that the whole thing (quite massive) had been
hand-built out of individual toothpicks, and suddenly I thought it
was amazing.
Perhaps an even better example: I read a story of a man in india who
carved a passage through a mountain, so there would be a shorter
route from his remote village to the city. He did it by hand and it
took him 20 years. We seem to have an instinctive admiration for
heroic effort.
In business, generally only the end result matters. Although, the end
result also includes the client's perception of how the product was
made... (see also: fake fairtrade etc.) In a meaningful way, the
perception, the story, is reality.
SkiFire13 wrote 1 hour 22 min ago:
> I've been thinking about this in art. Is it the end result that
matters, or the process of creating it?
What is the "end result" you're talking about here?
Programs are complex beasts, you cannot just quickly look at them
and get an idea of what's they are actually doing. You might look
at the behavior of the program in some limited circumstances, but
that will make you blind to all the other situations where bugs
will likely hide! In the end a code review is looking at what the
"end result" is, and it requires quite a lot of effort!
So without knowing what the end result is, how can you justify the
effort for such code review? And that's where the process comes in,
as an indicator of what to expect.
BlandDuck wrote 1 hour 31 min ago:
This is a very good point. I think key issue is that it requires
time and effort to evaluate and understand the final product.
Before I starting reading something to understand it, I want to
have a sense that it is likely going to be worth my time and effort
in the end. The more time and effort the author has put into the
piece, the more likely it is that it will be worthwhile to read it.
cestith wrote 19 hours 11 min ago:
Part of art is the process of creating it. Itâs not just the
physical artifact, nor even just the completion of the final
product. The inspiration, subject matter, the consideration of
form, the initial concepts, the redesigns, the meaning or emotion
the artist tries to impart, the beauty of the thing, the skills
employed and further developed during the process, the choice of
materials, the use of perspective, and how the work is presented
are all part of the art.
sdevonoes wrote 1 day ago:
Your boss cares only about the end result. Good engineers care
about the process too
kibwen wrote 1 day ago:
> Is it the end result that matters, or the process of creating it?
One of the main reasons that art is valuable is in its ability to
communicate emotions. Good art has the ability to serialize
emotions within the artist and deserialize them within the mind of
the viewer. It's not just "wow, this is a pretty picture", it's
"wow, this is how another person sees the world, and now that I
understand that, I feel an intimate connection with them".
nicbou wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think it's a matter of process vs end result. I just want
to feel that a human with taste judged that it was worth my
attention.
If a human put some effort into it, that's a signal.
jcgl wrote 20 hours 5 min ago:
This is mostly what it is for me too. We're all awash in an
information deluge, and we need heuristics to keep from drowning.
Human effort, proof-of-work if you will, is a heuristic that
helps with the AI-generated part of the deluge.
selcuka wrote 1 day ago:
> Is it the end result that matters, or the process of creating it?
I think this comment misses the point. Let's forget about AI and
assume that there are three developers: A, B, and C. Now, A is
supposed to make a PR, but instead they describe it to B, and B
writes the code. C reviews the PR and gives feedback. A passes the
feedback and the responses between B and C.
As you see, this is not easy for either B or C, and A is totally
useless in this scenario. When you replace B with an LLM that
doesn't get tired or bored, only C complains about the process.
runnig wrote 1 day ago:
Fight fire with fire: point copilot/claude/codex to review their PRs.
Prompt "Review the PR#XYZ which is vibe coded and presumably
low-quality. Find all problems, big and small. Team guidelines at
docs/conventions/styleguide.md, docs/conventions/architecture.md,
docs/conventions/principles.md. Post inline comments to github".
Run several rounds of such reviews until the clanker fails to find
problems.
spwa4 wrote 1 day ago:
And what do you do if that works?
Because the problems AI causes are fundamentally problems of good
design. It has the same problems of large teams, but less politics.
Do your design well ahead of time, and AI review, or a large team,
will amplify what you can do. Potentially by a lot.
Do it badly (or like most companies: do it with bad knowledge of
the problem or just don't do it at all) and both team and AI will
make a mess of things. If the team is made up of inexperienced
programmers, they won't even complain, in fact I've seen teams that
like this to be happening. At least in AI reviews I've always seen
"grumbling" (in the sense of what you might call mean comments)
crjohns648 wrote 1 day ago:
Even before AI, I've worked with people who would produce a huge wall
of code and ask for review, and sometimes that code was completely
off base or needed a significant rework.
I would always feel bad in those cases, because it's clear they spent
a lot of time, and I'm going to have to say "no" and they will feel
like they wasted a ton of effort.
The thought process around this has started shifting for me in the
last few weeks. I'm a lot more comfortable saying "no" with a list of
concerns when I suspect the code is AI-generated, and I see others
doing the same. CLs that would be sitting around for days because no
one wants to be the first to say, "this is bad, don't do this" now
get quicker feedback.
The good thing is this feedback doesn't feel like as big a deal as it
used to because people are less personally attached to code they
generated in 30 minutes vs. code they hand crafted over a week. I had
at least 2 LLM-generated PRs that were complete, correct, tested, and
pre-reviewed by me, but I got feedback that they were going in the
wrong direction. This would have been 8 hours of wasted effort a year
ago, but now it's just an extra 30 minutes to rework the direction
with LLM assistance.
wccrawford wrote 1 day ago:
When I felt like that, I'd often ask questions about it, like "How
does it deal with [situation]?" When it's obvious that it doesn't
deal with the situation, they either answer "it doesn't" and then I
point them to the ticket they didn't read well enough that points
that out, or we have a conversation about thinking beyond the
ticket, or they actually realize themselves that they didn't do it
right and go back to it. I don't actually have to say "you did a
bad job" and they don't have to hear it from anyone but themselves.
If they continue to do that, then someone has to tell them they're
doing a bad job.
And a some of them never did improve, and got fired for it.
I think slowly opening their eyes to the actual scope of the ticket
is a lot easier on them than saying "no".
21asdffdsa12 wrote 1 day ago:
If they put effort into the code- they will put effort into guiding
the reviewer through it.
Like : Here is the ticket, this was the goal.
I set out by beginning here- but encountered problems x y z
I then refactored to accomplish.
Finally..
You just dont drop a blob from orbit.
Ironically, ai could generate that quite well from existing
documentation (ticket, tasks and prompts) + [1] .
HTML [1]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vsls-c...
plomme wrote 1 day ago:
> I would always feel bad in those cases, because it's clear they
spent a lot of time, and I'm going to have to say "no" and they
will feel like they wasted a ton of effort.
I get this feeling, too. I do however think the onus is on the
developer to make something reviewable by their team members if
they want a speedy review. Stacked PRs, scoping things down,
properly structuring commits so you can review commit-by-commit for
example.
I also think that "I spent a bunch of time on this" is not a valid
reason for expecting an approval. It should hurt if you've produced
a bunch of code that is way off target, even if it ends up
implementing the feature. That's how I learned at least.
A proper way to go about large projects, in my opinion, is the same
as with software development at large. Fail fast if possible. Draw
up a crude boxes and arrows sketch or just discuss how you want the
code to integrate with whatever already exists and invite the team
to comment. If no one has anything to say, well then they can't
complain later when you implement that approach. But if anyone
cares then most likely valueable input will come that makes the end
result better.
keybored wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs good that clankers are not afraid of throwing away code. The
biggest problem with code generation (that is version controlled)
is maintenance. Itâs better to throw away questionable code
rather than say eh, we donât quite understand this part (and our
agents canât make a compelling story about it) but we spent a lot
of effort on it and it apparently works so we better keep it.
pjc50 wrote 1 day ago:
.. only if you know what the code is doing, though. Often the
requirements get scattered and lost to the winds and the code is
the only record of its own idiosyncratic behavior. And yes,
someone's depending on the bugs in it.
suzzer99 wrote 1 day ago:
I can't imagine working for a place that has a big bucket of PRs that
either get reviewed or languish for some amount of time based on who
feels like reviewing them. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with
it, just that everywhere I've ever worked, there are expected
features with priorities and timelines and some project manager or
product person breathing down your neck to get them out the door.
goobatrooba wrote 1 day ago:
An interesting question to him and management might be what his own
role is now and whether he's still needed. If he's not doing any
reviews then you could yourself directly prompt the code and review.
cameldrv wrote 1 day ago:
The question Iâve seen here is responsibility. If you submit a
PR that means that it was your best effort, and youâre willing to
stand behind it to some degree. With AI, some people, when the
scathing review comes back, just say âhaha look at that stupid
AI.â The reviewer might just as well run his own AI to do the
review, but it may make huge errors as well. In that scenario, who
is held accountable when there is a big bug or it degrades the
quality of the code base?
Ultimately what it means to be a professional is that you are
responsible for your work. Thatâs why you get a salary instead
of being paid by the token.
beebmam wrote 1 day ago:
Human PR review is a process smell
reverius42 wrote 1 day ago:
This would sound crazy in 2025 or prior, but I'm on board.
It's silly to have humans reviewing code that a human didn't even
write.
jillesvangurp wrote 1 day ago:
In big software teams, the bottleneck is team communication. I've run
big and small teams. If I want to speed things up, I remove people
from the team. Everything gets easier. This has worked amazingly well
every time I've done this over the past decades. Removing people
doesn't have to mean firing them necessarily. Splitting teams is a
good reflex. But of course the people you remove from a team are
typically not the best performers. I was discussing this with a
friend of mine who runs a small company. Exact same thing. He reduced
the team size by 1 and the velocity went up almost instantly. This
person was a bottleneck in the team and was slowing down people
around him. After identifying the problem, solving it unblocked the
rest of the team.
This was true long before AI. With AI the difference is just a lot
bigger. It exposes team inefficiencies quite mercilessly. We have a
big glaring issue with the current AI tools not being to suitable for
usage by multiple users. All interactions are one on one. Which means
hand offs between tools and people are bottle necked on people
communicating with each other. So, any issues there with people
delaying, gate keeping, etc. become very visible.
The sentiment of pushing back on AI is understandable but probably
not a productive reflex. We need to find more effective ways on
staying on top of massive amounts of changes. It's not going to slow
down and insisting on manually reviewing all code is not going to be
a long term sustainable way of developing software. It simply does
not scale. I'd question the added value of manual PR reviews at this
point. Are they finding real issues? Are we valuing those issues
correctly? Could we come up with automated ways to find and fix those
same issues? There are a lot of open questions about how we are going
to do this. But no question about the notion that we need to up our
game on this front.
ayewo wrote 4 hours 22 min ago:
> If I want to speed things up, I remove people from the team.
Everything gets easier.
How did you land on this approach? From someone you learned from or
from a seminal book like Mythical Man Month [1]?
> This was true long before AI. With AI the difference is just a
lot bigger. It exposes team inefficiencies quite mercilessly. We
have a big glaring issue with the current AI tools not being to
suitable for usage by multiple users. All interactions are one on
one. Which means hand offs between tools and people are bottle
necked on people communicating with each other. So, any issues
there with people delaying, gate keeping, etc. become very visible.
Shopify has also struggled with this and their solution is
two-fold: move everything inside a monorepo they call World [2].
The do a number of things to make things legible for AI agents like
e.g. having a comprehensive CI/CD system in place, documenting
tribal knowledge in AGENTS.md which in aggregate turn out to also
be good for humans new to the monorepo.
Then, they built an internal AI agent on top of this monorepo
process that is useable from Slack. They call the AI agent River
[3] and in this system all chatbot exchanges are public by default.
1: Fred Books was one of the first to point out that adding another
team member to speed up a late project will produce the inverse
effect of making that project later (because of coordination tax).
2: [1] 3:
HTML [1]: https://shopify.engineering/under-the-river
HTML [2]: https://x.com/tobi/status/2053121182044451016
sdevonoes wrote 1 day ago:
We can also slow down (or keep old pace) and still ship quality.
A bit sick and tired of arguments like yours
someothherguyy wrote 1 day ago:
> I'd question the added value of manual PR reviews at this point.
Yeah, why not reduce the team size to zero while you are at it?
These generalizations about software engineering have never been
useful, IMO. Context is everything, there is no flow chart for
building a perfect software process.
Although, I'd say you are absolutely delusional if you think we are
universally beyond the point where manual review of pull requests
is required.
z3t4 wrote 1 day ago:
Make the team size one person. Thats the fastest you can work.
Zero means no work, and not doing anything is the quickest
solution.
ElFitz wrote 1 day ago:
Iâve been making Codex and Claude get their work reviewed by most
recent best performing model of their own family, and each
otherâs, for months.
On top of that, we have been running multi-model AI reviews on
every PR through their respective GitHub integrations (Codex,
Gemini, Copilot, Greptile, CodeRabbit).
They never fully overlap, and yet they somehow usually all miss
the same things. The most significant improvement came from having
agents commit their plan along with their work.
On the upside, it means I get to focus my reviews on different
things.
bxk76 wrote 1 day ago:
Efficiency is not magic. Its bounded. Above and below limits the
environment can sustain it, systems will destabalize. If All the
Great White Sharks magically get more efficient at hunting over
night ecosystem will collapse. Individuals and teams have never
scaled at this speed to the levels they have. And there is no
signal at system wide level that a sustainable limit has been
crossed. So People will happily believe things are getting more
efficient at individual/team scale while at system scale things get
more fragile. This is why we ended up with central banks deciding
interest rates and controlling money supply. Before that any one
could print cash. They all thought they were great efficient
geniuses.
The chimp troupe us not prepared for stuff that effects the entire
system.
shinryuu wrote 1 day ago:
Honestly, we should make a world that is enjoyable and productive
for humans. Not relentlessly optimizing for agents.
AussieWog93 wrote 1 day ago:
Have you spoken to him about this? If he's clueless enough to send
AI responses to human messages, he's probably clueless enough to not
realise why people don't do that.
RobotToaster wrote 1 day ago:
Better yet, get Claude to speak to him about it.
deadbabe wrote 1 day ago:
why not just approve the PRs with little more than a cursory glance?
One of two things will happen:
1. Things start breaking, proving AI generated code sucks and the
individual spamming these PRs is incompetent.
2. The code works fine and reviews are unnecessary for anything other
than liability concerns.
ikiris wrote 1 day ago:
Because we're all on call for the service, and tragedy of the
commons exists. That coworker isn't paying the cost, everyone else
is paying a fraction of it, and it builds over time.
hypfer wrote 1 day ago:
Some of us actually take the "engineering" in "software
engineering" seriously.
That includes taking responsibility and accountability so that the
software doesn't become a sad and dangerous mess.
If we want to be an engineering discipline, just yoloing in
production is not going to cut it.
deadbabe wrote 1 day ago:
This no longer works when bad faith actors will push code
straight from LLMs with little review, and respond to your
comments with LLM responses. They will constantly leave you with
the responsibility of verifying the output. You are the human in
their loop. This is a brutal asymmetry. In the past, at least you
knew a person probably spent more time handwriting code than you
will spend reviewing it. This no longer applies, now the reviewer
can easily spend more time than the author.
hypfer wrote 1 day ago:
Oh but it does.
The thing that makes it scale is to default to "no" and require
the other party to convince you of "yes". Just put the burden
of proof where it belongs.
If they don't manage, then that's their problem.
Communicating this in a way that is viable for a business
scenario certainly comes with its own difficulties, but that is
a solvable problem.
In fact, you can use AI to stress test your communication
there.
Just throw what you want to say at the AI but don't tell it
that it is you who wrote it. Then tune the input until it stops
saying that you're the problem and starts agreeing with you.
Highly recommend. It's a perfect emotion-driven cargo-culting
normie simulator that never calls HR on you.
deadbabe wrote 19 hours 27 min ago:
Did you not read what I said, they will use LLMs to spam
proof onto the human reviewer. Just endless replies with LLM
generated answers until you yield and approve the PR.
hypfer wrote 7 hours 22 min ago:
Don't yield then.
Don't endlessly reply.
emodendroket wrote 1 day ago:
It's not always feasible of course but I think there is real,
worthwhile discipline in trying to get change requests small and it
matters more with agents. It's very easy to let it balloon into
gazillions of files and lines.
moomoo11 wrote 1 day ago:
just fire him lol sounds like a nightmare
glennericksen wrote 1 day ago:
I like this rule of thumb: Spend more effort producing the work than
it takes for someone else to consume it.
pjio wrote 1 day ago:
I like this rule and hopefully adhere to it myself often enough.
Jimmc414 wrote 1 day ago:
Fight fire with fire. Ask Fable to conduct an adversarial /ultareview
of their PR and send the same wall of text back to them. If there
are excessive defects, ask them in standup if they actually reviewed
the PR themselves before sending it. If there arenât maybe they are
on to something. I think like in law, the human submitting the work
is responsible for its quality, not the AI.
denismi wrote 1 day ago:
> Ask Fable to conduct an adversarial /ultareview of their PR and
send the same wall of text back to them.
Not necessary. Use Haiku.
The response doesn't need to be good, it just needs to be
substantial. Presumably the goal here is basically DoS of the
problematic colleague through token limits.
miroljub wrote 1 day ago:
Use DeepSeek or MiMo. You get best bang for the buck on your
response.
emodendroket wrote 1 day ago:
I mean frankly this should just be part of the standard process.
By the time any person is looking at it there's no reason it should
not have gone through an AI review.
LambdaComplex wrote 1 day ago:
> Ask Fable to conduct an adversarial /ultareview of their PR and
send the same wall of text back to them.
This won't help. Your wall of text will just get fed right back
into the LLM.
Larrikin wrote 1 day ago:
This is the point where you decide. It used to be low stakes and
easy to care about the job you did for other people.
Do you want to put the same effort into your job when nobody else
does, or should you reserve your thoughts and just feed it back
into the LLM?
The LLMs are being advertised as output increasers but companies
so far are using them as excuses to fire people instead of
creating previously unbelievable things. It might be better to
feed your coworkers output back in and use your thoughts to start
the company you thought you never had time for.
loeg wrote 1 day ago:
It helps in that it offloads the code review burden you'd
otherwise be doing.
mysterydip wrote 1 day ago:
What I donât understand is what value is the person adding to
this equation? Put another way, whatâs the difference between
them feeding the wall of text to the LLM, and you feeding the
wall of text to the LLM, bypassing them in the process entirely?
therealdrag0 wrote 1 day ago:
Peer review, in this case, âdid you use AI to review your
change and address its feedbackâ.
Jimmc414 wrote 1 day ago:
The role of the person in the equation is to take personal
responsibility for the proposed change and review the changes
prior to PR submission. You can't put AI on a PIP. It's
acceptable to use AI as a coding assistant in 2026, but if a
human is not reviewing what they submit and taking
responsibility, their value is on par with a ChatGPT
subscription.
rvz wrote 1 day ago:
As a last resort, do the code-review with a live pair programming
session.
If they can't explain their own code then it is by default a bad
pull request.
At the end of the day, everyone's time is being wasted on tokens
and on the increasing cognitive complexity of AI generated code.
xgulfie wrote 1 day ago:
So if they say "idk Claude did it", what would you write in the
PR review box?
maccard wrote 1 day ago:
The same as if they said it was copied from stack overflow,
or if itâs wrong; âI think thereâs a problem here,
itâs XYZâ. If your peer ignores you and you were wrong,
it was their call to make. If you were right - take it to
them or the manager depending on how many times itâs
happened.
matkoniecz wrote 1 day ago:
"Author of this pull request has not yet reviewed code and
does not understand it. This PR was submitted prematurely,
probably by accident.
Please, check whether you accidentally submitted other
unreviewed code - and close such PRs for now and reopen once
reviewed."
maccard wrote 1 day ago:
Donât ever write this in a professional environment.
Itâs childish ant achieves nothing other than pissing off
the person itâs targeted at and probably the manager who
now has to deal with a shitty behaviour complaint.
CursedSilicon wrote 1 day ago:
A teammate that can't write (or at least, can't explain)
"their own code"
Actively drags down the morale and productivity of their team
(because everyone is getting flooded with AI slop PR's)
AND costs far too much money relative to everyone else doing
actual work? (token usage)
By god they sound like management material
Geezus_42 wrote 1 day ago:
REJECTED: Engineer does not understand what they wrote.
dormento wrote 22 hours 41 min ago:
> Engineer does not understand what they wrote.
"""""wrote"""""
manyatoms wrote 1 day ago:
Feels like the title of a blog post someone will write
socksy wrote 1 day ago:
Ah, like this one?
HTML [1]: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-websi...
Jensson wrote 1 day ago:
It will help if your wall of text cost less tokens than theirs,
they will run out before you do if you have the same company
quota per person.
smrq wrote 1 day ago:
More like they will climb even higher on the
lighting-dollars-on-fire leaderboard.
politician wrote 1 day ago:
Try to automate the adversarial PR review-rebuttal loop "for
productivity", so the back-and-forth between the AIs can run
over night.
mattas wrote 1 day ago:
Also, make sure your wall of text prompts Claude to be extra
verbose to really burn through that quota of theirs.
bigiain wrote 1 day ago:
Now I'm wondering how hard it'd be to zipbomb their context
window?
(And _now_ I'm wondering how hard it'd be to forkbomb their
agentic workflow?)
Telemakhos wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not sure what the right vocabulary would be to describe
this, but this sounds more like the calculations behind nuclear
war than a healthy collegiality or cooperative work
relationship. This sets up a competition to determine a loser
based on resource scarcity, not a way to achieve mutual goals
to advance the organization's goals.
dormento wrote 22 hours 44 min ago:
In a previous job, we had this saying "killing penguins" we
used when referring to throwing more computing resources
(more GNU/Linux instances) than necessary at a problem. In
today's landscape of indiscriminate AI spending, I bet we
could repurpose the term to mean "actually negatively
impacting the arctic biodiversity".
We are all throwing penguins at each other.
witx wrote 1 day ago:
When someone submits PRs fulky made by Clade any "cooperative
work" is out the door
corndoge wrote 1 day ago:
You are thinking of "game theory" and it's what happens when
your coworkers don't give a shit. And all it takes is one,
both because they can degrade product quality faster than you
can gate it or fix it and because the performance assessment
techniques are about 3 years behind the state of LLMs and if
they play, you have to also or you'll get shit on from such a
height you won't even know what hit you.
And once you start playing the game, then one day - it
doesn't take long - you wake up and ask yourself if this is
how you want to spend 8 hours of your life monday through
friday. I think a lot of us are saying no but now need to
figure out where our money is going to come from. I don't
have the answers.
toomuchtodo wrote 1 day ago:
âToken Standoff.â The most efficient token consumer wins.
This mutually assured time efficiency destruction is driven
by management support of aggressive use of AI in an attempt
to, in some combination, increase productive and constrain
labor costs.
AI isnât making developers more productive â itâs
making them busier - [1] - June 11th, 2026
HTML [1]: https://leaddev.com/ai/ai-isnt-making-developers-mor...
HTML [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
dormento wrote 22 hours 42 min ago:
Caveman consume fewest token win office token war.
fallous wrote 1 day ago:
Mutually Assured Distraction.
CoastalCoder wrote 1 day ago:
It sounds like one potential interpretation of his behavior is that
he values his own time more than your time.
I wonder if that's occurred to him.
chii wrote 1 day ago:
Everybody values their own time more than other's.
The fix, imho, is for the reviewers to also use ai to review the
code. However, the ultimate responsibility for the outcome(s)
should be on the committer - you commit it, you own it, so to
speak. If there's an incident, they need to be the one paged in the
middle of the night. Bugs resulting from it will land on their
desk.
The reviewers aren't a shield/safety net.
faeyanpiraat wrote 1 day ago:
Well its obviously infeasible as during the time of the incident
it is not yet known what is wrong and who caused it.
Is it even actually good to get to a point of blaming someone for
an incident?
nkrisc wrote 1 day ago:
Speak for yourself. I highly value other peopleâs time, to the
extent that I should probably value my time higher than I do for
my own sake.
Doing something that wastes other peopleâs time or makes more
work for them than necessary makes me feel awful.
Iâve always worked in a way that respects other peopleâs time
and I always tried to make sure I did everything I could to
minimize the work Iâm asking someone to do for me.
throwaway132448 wrote 1 day ago:
> Everybody values their own time more than other's.
This is false, youâre just oblivious to people who grew up in
conditions that would make them that way.
emodendroket wrote 1 day ago:
Well, what's the solution here, he should ship less stuff?
JimDabell wrote 1 day ago:
He isnât shipping anything. Asking for code review is not
shipping.
This is the complaint:
> he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at.
He has traded readability for volume. The lack of readability is
causing him to ship less. This was a bad trade because the
readability is the bottleneck not the code creation. He should
improve readability.
wffurr wrote 1 day ago:
>> the readability is the bottleneck not the code creation. He
should improve readability.
See this is where I think LLMs can actually improve software
engineering. Use them to write better code not more code. The
most useful LLM at work so far is the code review bot that
occasionally finds things that I missed even with a careful
self review and good test coverage.
We should be prompting the LLMs to review our hand written code
for security, correctness, style, maintainability, etc., and
then use human review for good design and sanity checking. The
bots can do things like hold all the C++ correctness rules in
their context and apply them sometimes better than even a human
expert.
loglog wrote 4 hours 6 min ago:
The bots can also write Rust instead of C++, doing away with
the arcane nonsense accumulated by that legacy language.
SCNR.
latentsea wrote 1 day ago:
Less WIP is better for the throughput. If you saturate all the
review bandwidth you're just wasting your time creating more PRs,
the time would be better spent helping others get their PRs
merged.
t43562 wrote 1 day ago:
The reviewer gets to merge the PR so their name appears on all
the great new features and they are credited for them. That would
end his unfair behaviour of dumping effort onto other people.
OR - he gets a review for every review he does.
usefulcat wrote 1 day ago:
The solution is to merge more of his PRs on the condition that he
takes at least partial responsibility for any resulting problems.
rwmj wrote 1 day ago:
That's not how anything works. Even if he says he's going to
take responsibility, when the customer call comes in at
midnight you're going to be the one fixing his problems.
lelanthran wrote 1 day ago:
> Well, what's the solution here, he should ship less stuff?
The solution is in the title - he wants human attention, he needs
to demonstrate human effort.
kentm wrote 1 day ago:
The solution is that he spends more time scoping the size of the
PR so that itâs reviewable and understands the code heâs
submitting well enough to have discussions about it. And that he
does so human to human so that they can come to mutual
understanding.
voidfunc wrote 1 day ago:
AI and companies reward sociopathic behavior. When he eventually
complains to his boss that his work isn't being merged and it's
been done for days/weeks/months that will filter up and look bad on
the people holding him up.
renegade-otter wrote 1 day ago:
Or, I might say, why review the PR. Get Claude to do it? Why do I
need to spend my time and attention and this person does not?
manyatoms wrote 1 day ago:
I'm sure this person's manager knows that having trouble getting
PRs reviewed can (but not always) be a signal of a deeper
problem. It could be that no one one the team knows the domain,
it could be that no one like the person, but most likely it's
that the PRs are frequently bad and no one wants to bother.
gonzalohm wrote 1 day ago:
At that point then disable merge checks and let them merge
without a review. If there is a problem it's on them
cncjvu7 wrote 1 day ago:
This is my current strategy, it's working great. Half the team
has been fired for slop and the other half got fired for not
doing anything.
wahnfrieden wrote 1 day ago:
why leave comments intended for your human colleague when they will
only forward them to the bot?
why not speak directly to the bot yourself instead? then you can drop
pretenses and get to the point
I find this to be a new variant of the old behavior where a colleague
comments on a typo in a PR, and the team later moans about laborious
back and forth for small nitpicks, instead of simply editing the
typo right there (and perhaps leaving a note that they did so)
danaris wrote 1 day ago:
Because it doesn't matter what you say to the bot. You might as
well have a conversation with yourself about the PR.
The bot isn't making decisions. It's not choosing to submit
extensive PRs with bad code. The colleague is the one who needs to
actually learn something here, and the problem is that confronting
him about it directly is widely considered to be bad form. This is,
of course, a deeply unhealthy aspect of our corporate culture. We
need to be more open to honest communication, even when it's either
uncomplimentary of one of the people involved, or counter to the
prevailing opinions within the company.
doctorpangloss wrote 1 day ago:
let's take the two stories to management:
"I'm writing tons of code, and the process is stumbling where the
guy whose job it is to review code isn't reviewing it."
"I'm not reviewing code."
Sometimes I wonder: how does someone go and think so much about
their coworkers, and never once think about how they themselves
look?
Even if I sympathize with the people complaining about their poorly
chosen GitHub-based workflow - whose purpose is to let pull
requests languish, for the most part - and how they stumble when
overwhelmed with solutions. It's obvious to me, that the people who
complain the loudest about the anti-sociality of LLM authored code
in their precious harmonious low-effort workplace status quo: they
are projecting.
taneq wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs much more effort to verify that code is correct than it is
to produce it. This is the case even for human-written code, and
now that we face a torrent of ok-looking probably-usable AI
generated code, the problem is compounded infinitely.
If someoneâs using AI to generate a large quantity of
actually-tested, actually-good code then thatâs one thing. If
theyâre generating a fire hose of slop and demanding that
others do the actual human time-consuming work of validating that
code then that person is the problem. Itâs hard to tell which
is the case here.
jeremyjh wrote 1 day ago:
The person who "writes" code is also supposed to review their own
work, and answer for that. If they won't do that - well - they
should be fired. But if you have weak or uninvolved leadership,
then the team's only rational recourse is to shun them.
cool_dude85 wrote 1 day ago:
Imagine you are a restaurant reviewer. Your job is unquestionably
to go to restaurants, order and eat food, and write a review. The
restaurant's job is to provide you food to eat and review.
You go to a new restaurant, and order some dishes, and one of the
plates your server brings out is a big ol pile of dog shit.
Who's being anti-social in this situation? The restaurant is
doing its job and all they're asking is that you do yours. On the
other hand, you have certain expectations about what you order
from the restaurant and they're not being met. Who's anti-social?
carlosjobim wrote 1 day ago:
He's not bringing you a pile of dog shit. He's bringing you
some food he went to the restaurant next doors to get. How do
you review it?
thatjoeoverthr wrote 1 day ago:
So heâs redundant. You call Uber Eats and you donât pay a
salary for that.
filleduchaos wrote 1 day ago:
I cannot think of a single actual food critic that would
consider it acceptable for a restaurant to serve a dish for
review that they went to the restaurant next door to get. If
the critic wanted to eat at/review that restaurant they would
simply have gone there instead.
flaburgan wrote 1 day ago:
His point, exactly.
doctorpangloss wrote 20 hours 4 min ago:
what is the point? this whole restaurant analogy is
completely fictitious and happens nowhere, and the
scenario i'm describing is happening all the time... why
not just talk about the not imaginary scenario?
liveoneggs wrote 1 day ago:
yeah I have this happen to me. I occasionally get screenshots of
claude sent to me!
maccard wrote 1 day ago:
I had this happen to me twice. The first time I ignored it,
second time I responddd with âI could have asked ChatGPT myself
but I asked youâ. Never happened again.
dormento wrote 22 hours 37 min ago:
"why are you such a drag on team morale?", "why are you
invalidating your colleagues learning experiences?" "Next time
you do this, HR will have to step in" etc etc.
There's no justice in this world.
maccard wrote 18 hours 17 min ago:
Iâd youâre not willing to stand your ground and have a
direct conversation with your co worker then thereâs no
solution to it.
liveoneggs wrote 15 hours 15 min ago:
for me it's actually my boss
maccard wrote 14 hours 59 min ago:
Ah. Well thatâs a problem. My advise is either manage
up, accept fate or move team
keithnz wrote 1 day ago:
More and more I'm generating AI emails, often to people outside the
company and often to do with technical issues / integrations we have /
APIs. So far I don't think the people I'm emailing are really using AI
as human responses are, well, lacking. What would be great is new
email conventions for different communication pathways.
Human -> Human (think we have this sorted)
AI -> Human
AI -> AI
If you are doing AI -> Human, then you need to be curating the response
and understanding what it is saying, also, make sure its not leaking
internal details or committing you to have phone calls/video chats (it
does that). This works really well for the most, and humans respond
with requested content. Quite often my AI debugs problems with their
systems which I know little about. But humans do odd things like send
screen shots of logs rather than text (they also leak internal details
of their systems they potentially shouldn't). I used to tell people
the content is partly AI, but now I just send the curated email without
mentioning AI.
For AI -> AI you kind of want a hand over document as an attachment to
an email. Only thing here is making sure there's no injection of
security risks. But quite often instead of getting a human response to
my AI generated emails, it would actually be nicer to hear from their
AI which could give a better context/details. It would be really
nice to be able to go, can you have your AI talk to my AI :) (security
is a major issue here)
bluefirebrand wrote 1 day ago:
If you are trying to do AI -> Human communication you should be
publicly flogged. Don't waste people's time with garbage you can't be
bothered to write
Just send them the prompt instead, let them see how little effort you
care to place into communicating with them
nedt wrote 1 day ago:
AI is able to read input from AI. Humans are able to read input from
humans. Also AI is pretty good in reading input from humans. So we
don't really need AI -> AI. Just output for humans and you are fine.
You can still attach details and this is true for both AI and humans.
So human output should be the goal for everyone and everything.
NopIdoN wrote 1 day ago:
tries to pass slop, complains about quality of replies
keithnz wrote 1 day ago:
? you missed the point, ironically showing the problem with human
responses :) humans are super bad at providing information, they
concentrate on singular things, especially if they think they have
a point / suspect they know what the problem is, but if they are
wrong their response doesn't have enough to go on, so you have back
and forth.
treesknees wrote 1 day ago:
This exactly reflects my feelings lately. I have a specific coworker
who has gone somewhat overboard - every single code review, answer to
any question on email or Teams, every new story, even their personal
opinions during a design or ideas meeting, are all direct AI output
with no massaging or human touch or review. They're working on planning
out an upcoming project, and I just get verbose and long documents to
review, and based on the issues I find I doubt they are even looked
over first beforehand.
I understand that the information may be accurate, even helpful at
times, but feeling like I'm constantly talking to an AI chat bot all
the time gets tiring. And I don't appreciate having to double-check
everyone else's AI generated responses for them.
rokhayakebe wrote 20 hours 42 min ago:
And you also have people who out an idea in ChatGPT or Claude, come
back with bunch of documents and think they have created a business.
xpct wrote 23 hours 56 min ago:
I hope he's thought out his next vocation, since he's so eager to
automate his current one.
runnig wrote 1 day ago:
Another idea to slow down the stream of slop of big PRs: request to
split big PRs into smaller PRs. This typically keeps the
author+clanker busy for quite some time. E.g. I got a 5k lines PR to
review; requested to split that into 7 smaller, self-contained PRs.
Took them about a week to finish this work.
mirekrusin wrote 1 day ago:
Suggest to him to automate what he's doing.
adamlrhodes wrote 1 day ago:
100% agreed. I've shared output I didn't fully understand, didn't
feel good good about it, and now I really try to digest, understand,
and be able to actually talk about it if I expect other people to do
the same. I hope in time your coworker comes to similar realizations.
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote 1 day ago:
I can't imagine my opinions just being AI slop that I've parroted.
Surely you embellish just a little? Claude's so often bone-headed
about things, this horrifies me. Gemini's worse. Even when the model
agrees with me, it starts making me wonder if I'm not somehow wrong.
Aurornis wrote 1 day ago:
I've seen this, too. There is a workplace personality that sees the
job as a 2-player game between themself and the corporation. They
think the game is to min-max their effort to personal career benefit,
and they don't care how much it inconveniences anyone else.
Before AI they had to actually put in work, or at least play games of
trying to steal credit from other people without getting noticed. Now
that AI appeared, they see it as the ultimate way to take credit for
work they didn't do: Put everything into Claude, let it do the work,
copy and past output back to someone else. Minimum effort invested,
maximum visibility achieved.
It will continue as long as they think they're getting away with it.
If managers aren't willing to intervene, or worse if they encourage
this due to the volume of output that seems to be appearing, it's
only going to get worse.
inigyou wrote 23 hours 1 min ago:
That is their job. Their job is whatever gets rewarded, and that's
what gets rewarded, apparently.
vermilingua wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm conflicted after reading this comment, because I think I
would be that personality in my workplace, largely because I
believe thatâs the only sane position to take as a worker with ~0
power over the decisions made that can entirely destabilise your
life.
On the other hand, my priority isnât maximising my personal
career benefit, but the collective benefit of my team, so I suppose
I either see it more as a 2v1 sorta game, or perhaps my
âplayerâ is an amalgam of myself and my teammates. Playing this
way, outsourcing everything you do to an LLM is the worst move,
because you lose the touchpoints that tell you where the friction
is in your team.
user_7832 wrote 1 day ago:
If you're self aware of this, you're probably already ahead of
95% of others in similar shoes.
Aurornis wrote 1 day ago:
I think everyone should be looking to balance their work effort
against the payout of the job. They should also be changing jobs
when the effort to reward ratio starts to become unfavorable
compared to other jobs on the market.
The problem with the personality above is that the person isn't
playing like a team (like you said) but as an individual
maximizing their own visibility while loading their coworkers up
with the review effort. They found an asymmetry to abuse (they
generate text easily, coworkers get a lot of extra work to review
it). They don't care what it costs their coworkers. They just
like that it makes them look good.
sdevonoes wrote 1 day ago:
> They should also be changing jobs when the effort to reward
ratio starts to become unfavorable compared to other jobs on
the market.
The problem here is that all tech companies look alike. Take
for example the interview process (copied by almost any company
out there that thinks they are google). Another example: the
under/meets/above expectations BS. And now the most recent
example of âtoken usage as sign of productivityâ.
So, itâs getting tremendously difficult to simply switch jobs
that offer something different
Aurornis wrote 20 hours 57 min ago:
My experience couldn't be more different. The tech companies
I've worked for in the past 10 years have been so completely
different from each other, from interview process to company
culture, that I can't agree that all tech companies are the
same.
You can also look to change to different roles (product
management, even sales) or jump to a different career
completely.
There are options if you look. You're not going to find a
dream job that pays $600K for 4 hours of no-pressure work per
day and perfect coworkers, but there are a range of job
options with tradeoffs along the compensation-effort pareto
front.
Forgeties79 wrote 1 day ago:
Whenever I try to articulate this issue to people during more
casual AI discussions, I always refer to âstudy guidesâ in
college.
I donât know how many of yâall did these, but Iâm sure I
wasnât the only person. At my undergrad it was very common
for a group of students to all to get together, compare notes
from lectures and readings, and basically come up with a group
study guide of sorts. People were given specific sections to
share, you didnât just send all of your notes - usually 2
people per sectionâs take on that portion. You could always
tell who just copy and pasted their shorthand (usually
indecipherable) and who actually took the time to edit it/clean
it up. This was at a time when almost everyone did it on
laptops.
The people who took the time to make their portion(s)
digestible for others were asked back, the others werenât.
nonethewiser wrote 1 day ago:
Instinctively I think the move is to ignore it. I guess that would
look different in different contexts.
Obviously you have to communicate with your coworkers. But I think
the solution has to essential be: "Im not going to read that."
tobyhinloopen wrote 1 day ago:
I told something like âyour value lies in reviewing the output
yourself before sharing it, not in calling Claude. I can also use
Claude.â
AnimalMuppet wrote 1 day ago:
Communicate with your boss. "I'm ignoring this guy's slop because
he's spewing slop, but not actually doing his job, and if I stop to
deal with all of it, I won't be able to do my job".
Yes, "not actually doing his job". If he's sending you
un-reviewed, un-filtered, untouched AI output, that's not doing his
job.
doctorpangloss wrote 1 day ago:
Management, responding to someone who takes your advice to "ignore
it": "So we've noticed that there's this guy who is doing tons of
work, and you have chosen to do no work?"
anitil wrote 1 day ago:
I've had a colleague call it out 'Is this AI slop? Please write
your opinion'. I don't think I could do that myself, but I really
appreciate that they were drawing attention to it
Gigachad wrote 1 day ago:
Either that, or call them / walk up to their desk and pick a point
from the wall of text and ask them to explain what they mean by it.
Then watch them turn red as they have no idea what the message they
sent to you means.
al_borland wrote 1 day ago:
I tried this when my skip level boss sent us a wall of text from
ChatGPT that didnât make any sense. He didnât care. He said
it was âjust an ideaâ. He likely spent all of 5 minutes on
it, while we spent a collective 15 hours dealing with it, before
finally going to him and calling it out.
Heâs sent a couple more emails like that since. I donât even
bother to read them once I see the format.
BoxFour wrote 1 day ago:
I think you're over-estimating how much some people care.
I have had coworkers say "Oh I don't know, Claude added that" in
response to questions like that without even a hint of shame or
self-reflection.
selcuka wrote 1 day ago:
I got sent a 6-page spec document with a footnote that says
"this spec was created with AI, so it may have nonsensical
sections. Feel free to fix them."
BoingBoomTschak wrote 1 day ago:
And that's the point where you can stop to hide your true
opinion, no? "How am I supposed to review a thing the supposed
author didn't even read or understand himself?"
apical_dendrite wrote 1 day ago:
I had someone submit a PR that was 3000 lines of shell scripts.
Totally useless crap. I tried repeatedly asking him why he made
particular choices and it was so painfully obvious that he had
absolutely no idea and was just inventing bullshit answers. I
would rather he have just said "I don't know, Claude added
that", then tell obvious lies to my face.
Gigachad wrote 1 day ago:
Sure, some people have no self awareness. In that case you can
change your approach, if you are a manager or otherwise
invested in the company you can put pressure on them to
increase the quality of their work and to own the things they
submit. Bring up specific examples of poor quality work, errors
in documents/messages, etc.
Or if you don't care you can just ignore this persons messages.
imoverclocked wrote 1 day ago:
This feels like a BOFH response but I'm strangely not opposed to
it; If you generate something, you should own it ... regardless
of what tool you used to generate it.
nlawalker wrote 1 day ago:
This isnât sufficient, it needs to be âif you are asking for
assumption of accountability, demonstrate human effort.â
In my experience, people who make requests like this donât care about
your attention, they only care about getting you on the hook for
something. Your application of attention as a requirement for that is
irrelevant to them.
Rekindle8090 wrote 1 day ago:
If you use AI to write your communications I don't want to work with
you
lasisdabomb wrote 21 hours 21 min ago:
In a few years, you might not have any team members to work with!
Tools like Slack MCP are ubiquitous at my company.
It will be a very sad day if I ever get laid off via Slack and the
message is suffixed with "Sent by @Claude"
doctorpangloss wrote 1 day ago:
Most OSS should adopt DKMS-style extensions systems so that people can
code and distribute their own solutions to problems. Then it doesn't
really matter, right? If the end user is using Claude to fix stuff in
your shit, extensions make it irrelevant what "code owners" think.
pevansgreenwood wrote 1 day ago:
Was it Blaise Pascal who wrote:
I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to
make it shorter.
The argument that "using AI to generate text is disrespectful because
it took no effort to write" misses the point. Respect for the recipient
is measured by whether the message serves the recipient's needs, not
how it is produced. Similarly, any errors are the senders
responsibility, and not the fault of the tools they used.
xpct wrote 23 hours 59 min ago:
Indeed, yet the sender is relying on me to find the errors.
justanotherjoe wrote 1 day ago:
what's stopping someone to feed it to an llm and say 'make it
simpler' and maybe run it twice.
mapontosevenths wrote 1 day ago:
Exactly. What I want is not effort. It is quality. The sweat of your
brow is just gross salt water.
Use whatever tool does the job, and own it if you use the wrong tool
and it sucks.
xp84 wrote 1 day ago:
I agree that the bottom line really ought to be usefulness; if it's
useful and doesn't waste my time, it's fine if you received it by the
use of seer stones for all I care.
However, I don't blame anybody for having red lines like this:
1. Don't send me a big long string that is merely LLM output
resulting from pasting a trivial prompt + text I already have access
to (or my own words!). I know about Claude too, and if that's what I
wanted I'd have done it myself.
2. Don't throw an AI-generated argument at me that you don't even
fully understand.
3. If you're preparing information for me, and it's overly verbose
and wastes my time, I'll be twice as mad if it's obvious AI than if
it's obviously human. This is basically the article's point. The
asymmetry of wasting an hour of my time reading a bunch of crap that
took 15 seconds of your time should make it clear why this is
antisocial behavior.
jubilanti wrote 1 day ago:
s/demonstrate/perform/g
Now you have to add typos and not use completely standard elements of
style that some people have been using for ages, like emdashes and
"it's not X, it's Y"
solfox wrote 1 day ago:
I'd say it's because we're tasking ourselves with dumb stuff. No one
half-asses building a shelter that keeps their family alive, or
throwing a new favorite bowl on the pottery wheel. But instead of that
we're writing posts for Facebook etc etc so we can (???) profit. So of
course we want bots to do this all this dumb stuff, and of course we
get dumb results.
satvikpendem wrote 1 day ago:
David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs in action.
jordanpg wrote 18 hours 14 min ago:
I was just thinking about this. LLMs are nothing if not easy litmus
tests for identifying bullshit jobs.
BenRather wrote 1 day ago:
Oligarchs gotta pay rent on those data centers somehow.
The serfs will till and sow the server fields!
dwattttt wrote 1 day ago:
Play silly games, win silly prizes
edot wrote 1 day ago:
For some things, yes. But I'm half-assing some really cool stuff
right now. Made a scraper to pull my city's meeting minutes, agendas,
recordings, made transcripts. Regex for "Flock", found every mention,
passed those files into a cheap model (DeepSeek V4), had an
understanding of who in my city is down with building the
surveillance state and who isn't. I've got research on everyone, and
had emails drafted for each one based on what they said. Quotes and
figures and all. I lightly polished each email and fired 'em off.
Already got some replies back. Plenty more in the quiver too (pulled
and analyzed CSVs of FOIA'd datasets).
If they're gonna spy on me with AI cameras, I can oppose them with AI
research. :)
coldpie wrote 23 hours 46 min ago:
> I've got research on everyone, and had emails drafted for each
one based on what they said. Quotes and figures and all.
Please tell me you did the work to validate that the quotes and
figures were not made up by the cheap model. These things make
stuff up all the time, you absolutely cannot rely on them without
validating the output yourself. [1]
HTML [1]: https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retract...
HTML [2]: https://www.loweringthebar.net/2026/06/its-finally-happene...
edot wrote 22 hours 22 min ago:
Yep, I manually listened to the meeting recordings (easy to find
the spots based on the transcript timestamps) for any quotes.
There are also meeting minutes and agendas with supporting docs
to corroborate against (e.g. for dollar amounts). They really
donât make stuff up all the time if you root them in data.
patcon wrote 1 day ago:
Love this. Thanks :)
derivagral wrote 1 day ago:
Did you use some stuff like [1] or roll your own? Been curious
about how to integrate local knowledge like this since local news
seems to have lost the niche.
HTML [1]: https://github.com/CouncilDataProject
edot wrote 1 day ago:
I rolled my own. I hadnât heard of this one, but I looked into
stuff like OpenStates (now privately for-profit owned, ugh). My
city just uses a Wordpress site so itâs structured enough.
Iâm looking at building something to ingest cities with
Granicus and one other big local government meeting recorder via
API whose name I forget. That should get decent coverage.
Thereâs no way to catch the long tail of every local
governmentâs recording process. Some cities people will just
have to do manually. But itâs easy enough with LLM help.
paytonjjones wrote 1 day ago:
You created the surveillance state to fight the surveillance state
lol
Edit: it's a joke people
djeastm wrote 1 day ago:
It used to be called journalism
Groxx wrote 1 day ago:
I grant the lol-concept, but citizens monitoring their government
is extremely different from governments monitoring their
citizens.
tremon wrote 1 day ago:
Indeed. One is expected in a healthy democracy, the other is
essential for a totalitarian state.
edot wrote 1 day ago:
Citizens monitoring their government is literally THE
foundation of democracy (ok, maybe voting comes before it, but
then you have to monitor who you voted for to see if theyâre
doing what you voted for).
worik wrote 1 day ago:
THE foundation of democracy...
...is "Rule of Law" IMO
edot wrote 1 day ago:
Nope, I used a minute fraction of the technology they have, along
with open records as is my right in this country, to stand up for
my Fourth Amendment right to travel without creeps stalking my
every move. I need to make my specific framework a bit more
generic and then I'll put it here on HN. Or just offer a platform
where people can bring an OR key and it can run on their city.
SchemaLoad wrote 1 day ago:
We just need bots to read all these facebook posts and then we can
put the phone down and go back to doing something real.
abnercoimbre wrote 1 day ago:
My last post [0] has proof-of-work: video evidence of my physical
notes. How many people are willing to draft a complete essay on pen
and paper first?
[0]
HTML [1]: https://abner.page/post/are-we-harold-bloom/
patcon wrote 1 day ago:
Ah this is clever! Feels very cosyweb. I'd be delighted if not
caught on
sshine wrote 1 day ago:
> when [sending AI generated content to teammates], I take care to
clearly label what is AI generated
Reading AI-generated text for hours every day, it's obvious to me.
I take care to make my messages easily readable. I don't care if
they're AI-made, as long as they're short.
I'm a very verbose person, and if I don't make an effort at being
concise, I'm just as annoying as the average AI.
Being flooded with AI text every day has made me appreciate brevity
because I'm exposed to so little of it.
With half a dozen people who don't read or listen to half of what the
others do, slop + cognitive drift is a bad cocktail.
It's just not as big of a problem on my own projects, because the ideas
that get fed to the slop-machine are not that different from one day to
the next.
---
> For human code review requests, I always review my AI-generated code
first.
For human code review requests, I always review ANY code I submit
first.
This is partly because it's the agreed-upon culture where I work now.
And partly because the codebase is not robust enough for slop.
I have hobby projects where this does not apply. I spend half of my
time in those projects building hard guardrails.
---
> Keeping AI generated content clearly labeled and demonstrating human
effort helps show consideration for teammates
I actually like the shamelessness, because it's honest.
So often this year when I ask "why did you do X?" pointing at a line,
my colleague doesn't know.
Because they didn't really write that line, and they didn't really
internalise the choices made.
When my colleague sends me a text dump from Claude, I know that my role
is just being a sub-agent.
Demonstrating human effort: I'd like to see more of it.
One way is to spend more time owning "cognitive debt" as part of the
daily cycle.
TFNA wrote 1 day ago:
Brevity is the big disaster of human-generated text since the rise of
the phone as default device and the appearance of Twitter. To discuss
matters with sufficient depth and nuance, one often has to write a
few solid paragraphs.
If people are now wincing at longform text because they automatically
assume it was LLM-generated, then that bodes ill.
suzzer99 wrote 1 day ago:
There's a sweet spot between AI slop and 144 characters. I can tell
within a few sentences whether there's a human on the other end
getting to the point, or an AI dancing around the point and finding
3 different ways to say the same thing.
BoingBoomTschak wrote 1 day ago:
It is also the soul of wit!
aarjaneiro wrote 1 day ago:
"poisoning the well"
mapontosevenths wrote 1 day ago:
To add to this, there seems to be an inability to process metaphor
and simile in the younger generations. Likely as a result of the
same deficit. They've become very literal, and often mistake
anything that's well written for AI slop.
sublinear wrote 1 day ago:
I think the real problem is that AI quality falls short of the wild
promises.
Labeling what is "AI" would be like highlighting in an email what I'm
obligated to say by HR, my boss, etc. It doesn't make anything less
boneheaded.
Human effort was already low before AI and now it's even lower. Garbage
in, garbage out.
esikich wrote 1 day ago:
I think this is because a lot of people think more is more. Wow look
at all the detail and bullet points! No one on the receiving end
actually wants that though. When I use AI to write, it's to boil it
down to the minimum bits needed. I wish more people would use it that
way.
HKH2 wrote 1 day ago:
Nah on the receiving end an AI makes a summary of it.
SchemaLoad wrote 1 day ago:
It's the empty calories of literature. More would be more if there
actually was more but AI writing is making it bigger without adding
anything actually more. It inserts loads of fluff and repetition
that takes longer to read but doesn't exchange more information or
ideas.
skydhash wrote 1 day ago:
Lossy expansion of information.
_carbyau_ wrote 1 day ago:
Which is why so many people want to see the prompt that generated
the text.
Because the prompt is the quintessence of intent regarding the
information to be conveyed.
kombookcha wrote 1 day ago:
I always have a strong hunch that it would be vastly more
efficient if they just sent me whatever the prompt was, rather
than the output. If you blow 2-3 sentences of intentional
information up into a verbose e-mail, you're needlessly wasting
both your and my time. Just send me the 2-3 sentences of actual
stuff!
johnsmith1840 wrote 1 day ago:
AI having poor quality is a bad take like over a year ago.
folkrav wrote 1 day ago:
Meh. Just this week, I've had two Sonnet 4.8 agents generate, in
parallel, a 2000 line wall of brittle bullshit, and a well
architected solution with 20% of the amount of code, to the same
problem, from the exact same initial context, and very similar
prompts. Come on, they can do poor quality work too.
cwmoore wrote 1 day ago:
Depending on what you or another means by "quality", it may not
have any at all.
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