[HN Gopher] If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate h...
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If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
Author : jjfoooo4
Score : 1697 points
Date : 2026-06-11 23:01 UTC (2 days ago)
HTML web link (tombedor.dev)
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| sublinear wrote:
| 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.
| johnsmith1840 wrote:
| AI having poor quality is a bad take like over a year ago.
| cwmoore wrote:
| Depending on what you or another means by "quality", it may
| not have any at all.
| folkrav wrote:
| 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.
| esikich wrote:
| 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.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| 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.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| 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:
| 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!
| skydhash wrote:
| Lossy expansion of information.
| HKH2 wrote:
| Nah on the receiving end an AI makes a summary of it.
| sshine wrote:
| > _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:
| 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.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| 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.
| aarjaneiro wrote:
| "poisoning the well"
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| It is also the soul of wit!
| suzzer99 wrote:
| 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.
| solfox wrote:
| 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.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| 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:
| 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] https://abner.page/post/are-we-harold-bloom/
| patcon wrote:
| Ah this is clever! Feels very cosyweb. I'd be delighted if
| not caught on
| edot wrote:
| 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. :)
| paytonjjones wrote:
| You created the surveillance state to fight the surveillance
| state lol
|
| Edit: it's a joke people
| edot wrote:
| 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.
| Groxx wrote:
| I grant the lol-concept, but citizens monitoring their
| government is extremely different from governments
| monitoring their citizens.
| edot wrote:
| 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 they're doing what you voted for).
| worik wrote:
| THE foundation of democracy...
|
| ...is "Rule of Law" IMO
| tremon wrote:
| Indeed. One is expected in a healthy democracy, the other
| is essential for a totalitarian state.
| djeastm wrote:
| It used to be called journalism
| derivagral wrote:
| Did you use some stuff like
| https://github.com/CouncilDataProject or roll your own? Been
| curious about how to integrate local knowledge like this
| since local news seems to have lost the niche.
| edot wrote:
| I rolled my own. I hadn't 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 it's structured
| enough. I'm 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. There's no way to catch the long tail of
| every local government's recording process. Some cities
| people will just have to do manually. But it's easy enough
| with LLM help.
| patcon wrote:
| Love this. Thanks :)
| coldpie wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-
| retractio...
|
| https://www.loweringthebar.net/2026/06/its-finally-
| happened-...
| edot wrote:
| 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 don't make stuff up all the time if
| you root them in data.
| dwattttt wrote:
| Play silly games, win silly prizes
| BenRather wrote:
| Oligarchs gotta pay rent on those data centers somehow.
|
| The serfs will till and sow the server fields!
| satvikpendem wrote:
| David Graeber's _Bullshit Jobs_ in action.
| jordanpg wrote:
| I was just thinking about this. LLMs are nothing if not easy
| litmus tests for identifying bullshit jobs.
| jubilanti wrote:
| 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"
| pevansgreenwood wrote:
| 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.
| xp84 wrote:
| 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.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| 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.
| justanotherjoe wrote:
| what's stopping someone to feed it to an llm and say 'make it
| simpler' and maybe run it twice.
| xpct wrote:
| Indeed, yet the sender is relying on me to find the errors.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| 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.
| Rekindle8090 wrote:
| If you use AI to write your communications I don't want to work
| with you
| lasisdabomb wrote:
| 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"
| nlawalker wrote:
| This isn't sufficient, it needs to be "if you are asking for
| _assumption of accountability_ , demonstrate human effort."
|
| In my experience, people who make requests like this don't 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.
| treesknees wrote:
| 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.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| 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."
| Gigachad wrote:
| 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.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| 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.
| BoxFour wrote:
| 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.
| Gigachad wrote:
| 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.
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| 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.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| 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?"_
| selcuka wrote:
| 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."
| al_borland wrote:
| I tried this when my skip level boss sent us a wall of text
| from ChatGPT that didn't make any sense. He didn't care. He
| said it was "just an idea". 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.
|
| He's sent a couple more emails like that since. I don't
| even bother to read them once I see the format.
| anitil wrote:
| 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
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| 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?"
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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_.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| I told something like "your value lies in reviewing the
| output yourself before sharing it, not in calling Claude. I
| can also use Claude."
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| vermilingua wrote:
| I'm conflicted after reading this comment, because I think I
| would be that personality in my workplace, largely because I
| believe that's 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 isn't 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 "player" 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Whenever I try to articulate this issue to people during
| more casual AI discussions, I always refer to "study
| guides" in college.
|
| I don't know how many of y'all did these, but I'm sure I
| wasn't 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 didn't just send
| all of your notes - usually 2 people per section's 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
| weren't.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| > 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 "token usage as sign
| of productivity".
|
| So, it's getting tremendously difficult to simply switch
| jobs that offer something different
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| user_7832 wrote:
| If you're self aware of this, you're probably already ahead
| of 95% of others in similar shoes.
| inigyou wrote:
| That _is_ their job. Their job is whatever gets rewarded, and
| that 's what gets rewarded, apparently.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| 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.
| adamlrhodes wrote:
| 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.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Suggest to him to automate what he's doing.
| runnig wrote:
| 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.
| xpct wrote:
| I hope he's thought out his next vocation, since he's so eager
| to automate his current one.
| rokhayakebe wrote:
| 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.
| keithnz wrote:
| 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)
| NopIdoN wrote:
| tries to pass slop, complains about quality of replies
| keithnz wrote:
| ? 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.
| nedt wrote:
| 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.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| 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
| keithnz wrote:
| no, and this shows you haven't really used it, prompts are
| useless, access to context is what matters. It's because I
| have access to things that others don't that make the
| difference, prompts are useless unless you are accessing
| public information. What you and others are missing is the
| results are highly valuable to the recipient, assuming AI
| responses are garbage is just silly these days, people need
| to get over their obsession with "AI slop", because it isn't.
| niuzeta wrote:
| 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.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| 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)
| liveoneggs wrote:
| yeah I have this happen to me. I occasionally get screenshots
| of claude sent to me!
| maccard wrote:
| I had this happen to me twice. The first time I ignored it,
| second time I responddd with "I could have asked ChatGPT
| myself but I asked you". Never happened again.
| dormento wrote:
| "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:
| I'd you're not willing to stand your ground and have a
| direct conversation with your co worker then there's no
| solution to it.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| for me it's actually my boss
| maccard wrote:
| Ah. Well that's a problem. My advise is either manage up,
| accept fate or move team
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| 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.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| 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:
| 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?
| filleduchaos wrote:
| 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:
| His point, exactly.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| 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?
| thatjoeoverthr wrote:
| So he's redundant. You call Uber Eats and you don't pay a
| salary for that.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| 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.
| taneq wrote:
| It's 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 someone's using AI to generate a large quantity of
| actually-tested, actually-good code then that's one thing.
| If they're 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. It's
| hard to tell which is the case here.
| danaris wrote:
| 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.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| 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.
| voidfunc wrote:
| 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.
| gonzalohm wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| manyatoms wrote:
| 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.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| 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?
| emodendroket wrote:
| Well, what's the solution here, he should ship less stuff?
| kentm wrote:
| The solution is that he spends more time scoping the size
| of the PR so that it's reviewable and understands the code
| he's submitting well enough to have discussions about it.
| And that he does so human to human so that they can come to
| mutual understanding.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > 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.
| usefulcat wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| t43562 wrote:
| 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.
| latentsea wrote:
| 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.
| JimDabell wrote:
| He isn't 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:
| >> 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:
| The bots can also write Rust instead of C++, doing away
| with the arcane nonsense accumulated by that legacy
| language. SCNR.
| wffurr wrote:
| Bot-assisted Rust could be amazing; there's some ports
| already happening which wouldn't have otherwise. Maybe
| Rewrite-it-in-Rust can actually be a real thing and not
| just a meme. But it does put a big burden on implementors
| to understand what they're generating, and now it's in an
| unfamiliar language to boot.
| chii wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway132448 wrote:
| > Everybody values their own time more than other's.
|
| This is false, you're just oblivious to people who grew up
| in conditions that would make them that way.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Speak for yourself. I highly value other people's time, to
| the extent that I should probably value my time higher than
| I do for my own sake.
|
| Doing something that wastes other people's time or makes
| more work for them than necessary makes me feel awful.
|
| I've always worked in a way that respects other people's
| time and I always tried to make sure I did everything I
| could to minimize the work I'm asking someone to do for me.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| 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?
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| 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 aren't maybe they are on to something. I think like in
| law, the human submitting the work is responsible for its
| quality, not the AI.
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| > 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| 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.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| "Token Standoff." 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 isn't making developers more productive - it's
| making them busier_ - https://leaddev.com/ai/ai-isnt-
| making-developers-more-produc... - June 11th, 2026
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
| fallous wrote:
| Mutually Assured Distraction.
| dormento wrote:
| Caveman consume fewest token win office token war.
| corndoge wrote:
| 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.
| witx wrote:
| When someone submits PRs fulky made by Clade any
| "cooperative work" is out the door
| dormento wrote:
| 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.
| mattas wrote:
| Also, make sure your wall of text prompts Claude to be
| extra verbose to really burn through that quota of
| theirs.
| bigiain wrote:
| 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?)
| politician wrote:
| Try to automate the adversarial PR review-rebuttal loop
| "for productivity", so the back-and-forth between the AIs
| can run over night.
| smrq wrote:
| More like they will climb even higher on the lighting-
| dollars-on-fire leaderboard.
| rvz wrote:
| 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:
| So if they say "idk Claude did it", what would you write
| in the PR review box?
| Geezus_42 wrote:
| REJECTED: Engineer does not understand what they wrote.
| manyatoms wrote:
| Feels like the title of a blog post someone will write
| socksy wrote:
| Ah, like this one? https://crabby-
| rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
| dormento wrote:
| > Engineer does not understand what they wrote.
|
| """""wrote"""""
| CursedSilicon wrote:
| 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
| matkoniecz wrote:
| "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:
| Don't ever write this in a professional environment. It's
| childish ant achieves nothing other than pissing off the
| person it's targeted at and probably the manager who now
| has to deal with a shitty behaviour complaint.
| maccard wrote:
| The same as if they said it was copied from stack
| overflow, or if it's wrong; "I think there's a problem
| here, it's XYZ". 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 it's happened.
| mysterydip wrote:
| What I don't understand is what value is the person adding
| to this equation? Put another way, what's 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?
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| 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.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Peer review, in this case, "did you use AI to review your
| change and address its feedback".
| loeg wrote:
| It helps in that it offloads the code review burden you'd
| otherwise be doing.
| Larrikin wrote:
| 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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.
| denismi wrote:
| > 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:
| Use DeepSeek or MiMo. You get best bang for the buck on
| your response.
| glennericksen wrote:
| I like this rule of thumb: Spend more effort producing the work
| than it takes for someone else to consume it.
| pjio wrote:
| I like this rule and hopefully adhere to it myself often
| enough.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| just fire him lol sounds like a nightmare
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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.
| deadbabe wrote:
| 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.
| hypfer wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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:
| Don't yield then.
|
| Don't endlessly reply.
| ikiris wrote:
| 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.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| 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:
| Better yet, get Claude to speak to him about it.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| 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.
| shinryuu wrote:
| Honestly, we should make a world that is enjoyable and
| productive for humans. Not relentlessly optimizing for
| agents.
| bxk76 wrote:
| 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.
| ElFitz wrote:
| I've been making Codex and Claude get their work reviewed by
| most recent best performing model of their own family, and
| each other's, 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.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| > 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:
| Make the team size one person. Thats the fastest you can
| work. Zero means no work, and not doing anything is the
| quickest solution.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| We can also slow down (or keep old pace) and still ship
| quality.
|
| A bit sick and tired of arguments like yours
| ayewo wrote:
| > _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: https://shopify.engineering/under-the-river
|
| 3: https://x.com/tobi/status/2053121182044451016
| beebmam wrote:
| Human PR review is a process smell
| reverius42 wrote:
| 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.
| goobatrooba wrote:
| 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:
| The question I've seen here is responsibility. If you submit
| a PR that means that it was your best effort, and you're
| willing to stand behind it to some degree. With AI, some
| people, when the scathing review comes back, just say "haha
| look at that stupid AI." 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. That's why you get a salary
| instead of being paid by the token.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| 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.
| crjohns648 wrote:
| 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.
| keybored wrote:
| It's good that clankers are not afraid of throwing away code.
| The biggest problem with code generation (that is version
| controlled) is maintenance. It's better to throw away
| questionable code rather than say eh, we don't quite
| understand this part (and our agents can't 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:
| .. 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.
| plomme wrote:
| > 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.
| 21asdffdsa12 wrote:
| 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) +
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vsls-
| con....
| ozim wrote:
| Half is a joke half not:
|
| Not sure how you are working but we have this novelty idea
| where people have daily meetings like 15 mins each day to
| update each other which tasks they are busy with.
|
| We also have refinement meetings where people are involved
| in clarification for each task so they are not surprised by
| requirements.
|
| So we do planning meetings every two weeks. Each ticket is
| tied to the code in commit.
|
| So by code review time anyone doing CR has all of the
| information in few clicks and some of it already in their
| head.
| wccrawford wrote:
| 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".
| runnig wrote:
| 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:
| 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)
| andai wrote:
| 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.
| selcuka wrote:
| > 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.
| nicbou wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> 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".
| sdevonoes wrote:
| Your boss cares only about the end result. Good engineers
| care about the process too
| cestith wrote:
| Part of art is the process of creating it. It's 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.
| BlandDuck wrote:
| 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.
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| > 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.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| 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.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| 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:
| > 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
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Agree. All the subtleties of how a high trust environment
| work are hard to enumerate
| jonahx wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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)
| teiferer wrote:
| Agreed. But those things are not mutually exclusive.
| rplnt wrote:
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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.
| necovek wrote:
| 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:
| > 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:
| 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?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Does everybody produce completely readable, tested code
| every time?
|
| Do your coworkers not reliably produce readable, tested
| code?
|
| That's kind of the minimum bar for a software engineer in
| my book
| necovek wrote:
| I like to invert that to: do I produce code I am
| perfectly happy with in regards to readability and
| maintainability or would I benefit from another pair of
| eyes?
|
| Every question I get (when my code is reviewed) is a
| signal that code could be more self-explanatory, unless
| it is a complex algorithm itself, and that my -- by now
| deep -- exposure to the problem is keeping me misguided
| about what is and isn't "obvious" or "clear". A reviewer
| can take a step back and help ensure both them and I will
| be able to easily grasp the same code 3 or 24 months
| later.
|
| Note that one of the best advice I got early in my career
| about doing a good code review is that you "just" need to
| ask good questions: the point is not for a reviewer to
| show how much smarter they are, but for both to develop a
| shared understanding and ensure code can be interpreted
| as quickly as possible.
| meta_gunslinger wrote:
| 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:
| 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?
| skydhash wrote:
| 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 variables' name are too
| generic. Maybe your modules are messy and your data
| structures are not modeled well.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| vibe check
| rplnt wrote:
| 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.
| meta_gunslinger wrote:
| 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.)
| necovek wrote:
| As said already: readability and maintainability of the
| code (closely related) are two most important values a
| code review can get you.
| throwaw12 wrote:
| > 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?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > 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
| throwaw12 wrote:
| > 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.
| wccrawford wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| loglog wrote:
| 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."
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| > also shift the responsibilities to the AI agents as well
|
| That's not gonna fly most of the time.
| dust-jacket wrote:
| > 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
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > 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.
| my-next-account wrote:
| There's also those that burn themselves out, and John
| Carmack!
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| > ... and its never them
|
| IME, it's because they lack the experience to have the
| Taste one develops as a senior engineer. "This works, and
| is somewhat understandable" is as far as they get. Little
| to no understanding of how this solution could fit better
| in the codebase.
| whstl wrote:
| 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:
| https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-
| quality...
|
| If you have to constantly rationalize performance
| differences by demeaning others, this says more about you
| than the prolific people.
| wccrawford wrote:
| 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:
| 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".
| Tade0 wrote:
| 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.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| 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:
| No need to pair program, you can always send a message to
| your colleague about the design of the upcoming code,
| especially if it's going to impact them or if it's an area
| that they're more familiar with. Waiting till a PR for
| feedback is wrong IMO.
|
| Code review is not for feedback, it's 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:
| 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.
| skydhash wrote:
| I don't think so. There can be a lot of shared context
| within the team which can make prose shorter than writing
| code. And written words last longer than verbal exchange.
| samiv wrote:
| 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.
| meindnoch wrote:
| 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)
| swiftcoder wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > 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:
| > 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:
| 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:
| > 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)...
| Tade0 wrote:
| 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.
| whstl wrote:
| 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.
| neogodless wrote:
| 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.)
| teiferer wrote:
| > 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.
| bartread wrote:
| > Have your PRs the right size?
|
| I've noticed that large PRs aren't just a problem for human
| reviewers: they're a problem for AI reviewers too.
|
| If I submit a 100 line PR I'm 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 don't
| have time and/or get scrolling blindness, and the AI
| reviewer is likely to give me a response that amounts to,
| "<<slaps roof>> Looks good to me bro: ship it!"
|
| 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:
| 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.
| fg137 wrote:
| 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:
| > 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
| fg137 wrote:
| > 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:
| 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.
| hatsix wrote:
| This is such a weird take. From my 5 years at Amazon, the
| only people I saw "managed out" were engineers who were
| good, it even great, at the code part of their job, but
| trash at working with the team. Our hiring bar was
| notoriously high, and it wasn't uncommon for engineers
| who were leads at their startup to get hired at L5.
|
| When I was Bar Raising for promotions, I didn't review
| their PRs, I reviewed their Reviews. I reviewed the PRs
| that mentioned those reviews to see what slipped by. I
| looked at non-crunch time to verify they were reviewing
| at least as much code as their teammates.
|
| If I saw someone 4x-ing the amount of code, they had
| better be 4x-ing the reviews too... if all they were
| leaving was stylistic formatting comments, they'd never
| make it to L6, unless the only thing they were reviewing
| was L6 code.
| necovek wrote:
| 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.
| thi2 wrote:
| Not my experience and especially for juniors reviews were
| an excellent tool to learn and get mentored.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| jt2190 wrote:
| > 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 team's 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.
| necovek wrote:
| 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 -- when done for a fellow human who I might be
| teaching.
|
| It is definitely very grunt-like for an LLM.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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:
| 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 didn't write
| anything about his involvement in reviewing the code -
| could he be just asshole team member ?
| epage wrote:
| 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 https://epage.github.io/dev/pr-
| style/.
| anthuswilliams wrote:
| 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:
| https://apenwarr.ca/log/20260316
| bobsomers wrote:
| > 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:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| iovrthoughtthis wrote:
| Code review should be a separate function
| AJRF wrote:
| 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.
| Roark66 wrote:
| 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.
| xpct wrote:
| 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?
| jjice wrote:
| > 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.
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1gFSENorEY
| rDr4g0n wrote:
| around my workplace we say if you're copy/pasting llm output,
| you're indicating an llm can do your job.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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?
| rodonn wrote:
| 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:
| > 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?
| Aldipower wrote:
| 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.
| DanielHB wrote:
| 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:
| > 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.
| Finnucane wrote:
| 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.
| pixlmint wrote:
| Yup, I always phrased this as "if you can't be arsed to write it,
| I won't read it"
| zetanor wrote:
| 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."
| beej71 wrote:
| FMFL. I'm going to build a paper-based social network where
| non-handwriting is prohibited. Like in the 70s.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| There are handwriting physical bots too, or even AI image
| generators for "handwritten" text.
| nosioptar wrote:
| You should. Then I could start my SHWAAS business offering
| unbreakable encryption for it.
|
| (Shitty Handwriting As A Service).
| carlosjobim wrote:
| 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:
| I don't know if writing the URL will get me banned but
| someone had this idea for licenses at plus<N word>.com
| esperent wrote:
| > 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:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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:
| High schoolers are to senior software engineers as
| current models are to future models. Is that really so
| hard to follow?
| Enzime wrote:
| I think this is a gap in the tooling (Git, VCS, and forges) and
| the Zed people are working on this
|
| https://zed.dev/blog/introducing-deltadb
| threetonesun wrote:
| 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?
| miqkt wrote:
| 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.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| 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.
| schyzomaniac wrote:
| Related - this was posted in march:
| https://stopsloppypasta.ai/en/
| seriocomic wrote:
| can't believe meatfingers.com has been registered (dormant)...
| analog8374 wrote:
| Maybe this is why generative art never really took off.
|
| That said, roguelikes are awesome. So there is definitely a place
| for simulated effort.
| egypturnash wrote:
| 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| 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.
| card_zero wrote:
| Real effort, surely? Simulated reward.
| dabinat wrote:
| 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, what's 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 we're in.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| having worked in tech and now running my own company..
|
| the honest truth is that maybe 10-20% of SWE (at best) are
| "good". sure it is harsh but i won't lie. if you're good you'll
| probably relate.
|
| the rest kind of suck.
|
| i've never gotten anything lower than Exceeds Expectations in
| my career so I've seen how awful some engineers were. i've 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 can't use their brain? i'd 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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.
| justanotherjoe wrote:
| 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.
| discreteevent wrote:
| 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:
| thats fine you can leave. it's probably for the best for
| us. that's 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. it's also a
| video game and it's 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, that's
| super key imo.
|
| so far it's worked out fine. people get the fast firing
| thing. they know if someone isn't onboard with carrying
| out the mission they also don't want to be burdened.
|
| like we are seriously helping people in an underserved
| industry. it's 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 don't need to be MIT grads paper
| weight types. they just need to be mission oriented and
| focused.
| bandrami wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| LandR wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > 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 "gotcha"
| 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 you'd solve it as-is;
| others ask it as a way to probe how you'll deal with
| strange or misguided requests (the case you noted as
| disturbing); and others yet will ask it to see how you'd
| practically solve it (your intention).
|
| Seems like a bad interview question without context
| regarding kind of answer you're looking for.
| bandrami wrote:
| 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.
| firmretention wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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.
| bandrami wrote:
| Nope, not remotely awful. I've made great hires from it,
| which is its point.
| vouwfietsman wrote:
| 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_.
| nkrisc wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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).
| rightbyte wrote:
| > 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.
| bandrami wrote:
| If "I want to see your instincts towards solving a
| problem" is a "gotcha" then we should just draw lots to
| hire people.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| hypfer wrote:
| Keep up with what?
|
| We've already established that most of it is noise. You
| don't need to keep up with producing noise.
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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:
| You seem to be arguing against something I did not say?
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| 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
| inigyou wrote:
| 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.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| I actively support "my boss" to run Claude Code. I offered them
| to help and made jokes it's so easy these days they might as
| well just call Claude Code themselves. I've 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. I've helped to review and improve
| completely vibe-coded projects by such employees.
|
| I'm not sure what my role will be, but I fully embrace that my
| traditional role of writing code is gone.
| dTal wrote:
| I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords...
| phyzix5761 wrote:
| 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:
| > 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:
| Right, like I hope your deep knowledge wasn't something you
| can just ask Claude!
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| erelong wrote:
| > "no"
|
| Sometimes human effort doesm't have to be complicated though
| (concise communications)
| wnevets wrote:
| 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?
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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.
| vermilingua wrote:
| > 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.
| It's absurd to think that the above quote is now something
| approaching controversial.
| Zanni wrote:
| 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?
| arjie wrote:
| This is just an old engineering principle of work amplification.
| For an input of x you shouldn't routinely do nx. If you do you'll
| 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.
| altairprime wrote:
| "I forwarded your AI's email to mine for training and I assume it
| will be incorporated into future outputs. Appreciate the inputs!"
| koinedad wrote:
| Yes
| j16sdiz wrote:
| <begin devil's advocate>
|
| 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
|
| </end devil's advocate>
| mmmpetrichor wrote:
| 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.
| dTal wrote:
| 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.
| xpct wrote:
| 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.
| avmich wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| xyzal wrote:
| How about reviving key signing parties?
| dwd wrote:
| 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.
| simianwords wrote:
| Why not Jira Mcp?
| scotty79 wrote:
| This should be a rule in the advertising industry.
| jmeri wrote:
| Why should I bother to read something someone else has not
| bothered to write?
| madaxe_again wrote:
| It really depends. In many cases, you absolutely shouldn't.
|
| 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
| it's a language Google translate makes a mess of, every time.
|
| So in that case, you'd be advised to read it lest you end up in
| court.
| tristor wrote:
| 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:
| Consumer dispute, not business - and yes, if it goes to
| court, of course I will hire a lawyer.
| boomlinde wrote:
| Did you bother to read the resulting translation?
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Yup, translated it back through Google and double checked
| it wasn't giving me horseshit.
| protocolture wrote:
| (Human) Attention is all you need.
| flowerthoughts wrote:
| 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.
| mihaaly wrote:
| 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.
| maurits wrote:
| I have publicly stated that if you can't be bothered to write, I
| can't be bothered to read.
| dofm wrote:
| 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:
| "it feels like no care was taken here so why should I give it my
| time?"
| joshuaS98 wrote:
| Welcome to the age of slop.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| 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.
| barrell wrote:
| I think it's 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 I'm 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. There's 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:
| 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:
| 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
| don't know anyone that can't spot it a mile away at this
| point, and the more people are confronted with slop, the
| more attuned they become to it.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| 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.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| This seems akin to hating on a toddler because they can't
| talk, with the only alternative being pretending that they
| are great conversationalists. It's a category error.
|
| I don't need a human to be particularly good at anything to
| like them. Maybe that is how you work, but the idea is just
| misplaced to me.
| hooverd wrote:
| have you considered that you're just progressively lowering
| your threshold for discomfort?
| frameset wrote:
| 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.
| janpeuker wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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.
| juanre wrote:
| 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:
| https://possiblymadebyahuman.com/7PuEdZs1i1
| hathym wrote:
| a solution waiting for a chrome extension :)
| juanre wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/possiblymadebyahuma.
| ..
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| Ah, okay! Would you mind explaining what does "comparing
| wording, not exact text" mean?
| juanre wrote:
| 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:
| I must agree that is quite poorly phrased
| bonzog wrote:
| 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.
| zkmon wrote:
| 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.
| Sharlin wrote:
| 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 -
| freeriding is equivalent to defecting.
| sceptic123 wrote:
| Or in other words: https://noslopgrenade.com/
| nusl wrote:
| 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.
| KerrickStaley wrote:
| 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 / don't follow) and no human
| responses. The thing is that I already asked multiple frontier
| AIs the same question and didn't 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 hasn't already done their homework and
| tried asking an AI.
| izucken wrote:
| human attention is all you need
| tomaskafka wrote:
| 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.
| alanwreath wrote:
| 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 PR's into one consolidated PR.
|
| The script was excellent because it simplified the review process
| for a single repo (that had many competing dependsbot PR's) and
| it also happened to do this across increasingly many many
| different repo's 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 pr's didn't correspond at all to the effort
| required to review x pr's.
|
| The optics were also lopsided since the script would operate on
| the runner's local machine and so it would have seemed as if the
| person who made all these PR's 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 developer's 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 I'd
| argue because tangentially reviewers can also tend to just click
| "approve" (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 won't 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 PR's), it
| takes additional time to provide reviews that seem as if you even
| read the PR or don't 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
| PR'ed 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 this...that "approve" button becomes sooooo
| tempting.
|
| It's funny because fast forward some of the ways I battle
| increasingly prolific AI generated material is through GitHub's
| CoPilot bot. I ask it to do the review first and when it gives
| the review there is none of that dynamic because it wasn't me who
| levied the criticism and also it's 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 "almost" because a)sometimes the critiques from the bot
| are wrong and b) the critiques aren't necessarily deterministic,
| so just because they are there or not doesn't mean you are truly
| relieved of that portion of the review process (for better or
| worse).
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| 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
| noobcoder wrote:
| Can you tell if its written by AI or not? I will read it once I
| get the answer
| gwd wrote:
| "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.
| jappgar wrote:
| 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.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| Way to miss the point. Bob on the other side of the room
| didn't train the model
| kingkawn wrote:
| You can't take credit for other people's work to displace the
| absence of your own
| Telaneo wrote:
| 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:
| 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
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| @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
| lewispollard wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| > 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.
| someguyiguess wrote:
| Couldn't agree more.
| Telaneo wrote:
| 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.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| on the other hand, when I see a long post here I assume
| it's yet another ego-driven tirade and skip past it.
| hliyan wrote:
| > 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:
| "performative" = "ego-driven"
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| long, low: copypasta; rant; sales; slop.
|
| (brevity, purposeful /s).
| hackable_sand wrote:
| A comment should fill exactly the amount of space that it
| fills, no?
| gwd wrote:
| 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.
| Bootvis wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| This is about human attention and what is worth getting
| it. Both points are very important and valid.
| dentemple wrote:
| > Either don't respond, or respond in kind.
|
| !
| dredmorbius wrote:
| <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/14/exclamation/> ?
| Archer6621 wrote:
| 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.
| suncemoje wrote:
| 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.
| mindwok wrote:
| I'd push back on this, I think people have a very intrinsic
| sense of what is valuable and often if you think it's
| "perception" of value being rewarded, it's 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
| "performer" and always make noise, whereas the other actually
| delivers - they're being promoted because the promotion is
| defensible and legible for their superior. That is true value
| for them, just not to another viewer.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| _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.
| hliyan wrote:
| Use value or exchange value?
| Archer6621 wrote:
| They're the same no? If I see exchange value in
| something, that is its use value to me: to exchange it
| for other things that I deem valuable.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| 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 is--in the most generous
| interpretation--a 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:
| 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:
| 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. That's 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.
| Archer6621 wrote:
| I was hesitant to elaborate there, because the relationship
| between effort and value is quite complex.
|
| For instance, you can put a lot of effort into something,
| without creating any value for yourself or for others. But
| it is often true that things of utility need a sufficient
| amount of compounded effort behind them before they become
| valuable, otherwise they are common and easy to obtain.
| Value is necessarily relative.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Counterpoint: I know it when I see it.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| 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.
| nucleardog wrote:
| 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.
| hluska wrote:
| I don't formalize anything that extreme for my teams because
| I can't diagnose people, but I know that things like anxiety,
| imposter syndrome and a whole wack of things that aren't
| related to work get involved. It's acceptable to ask for
| help. I like to know what people have tried but sometimes
| they don't know how to start. And that's a great place to
| start.
|
| I guess we all have different styles but some may be more
| inclusive than others.
| bisby wrote:
| 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."
| nucleardog wrote:
| 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
| astqs wrote:
| I'd add that it's basic respect and decency for your fellow
| humans who are paying for the attention with their own life.
| nucleardog wrote:
| 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.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > 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.
| gwd wrote:
| 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.
| purpleflashing wrote:
| 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
| doesn't get the feeling of it being anything that's tied to
| their actions. It's 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.
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| 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.
| msla wrote:
| 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.
| justin66 wrote:
| > 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.
| toss1 wrote:
| 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:
| "Use your brain before you use mine"
| monkeydust wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| > 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"...
| whstl wrote:
| Another productivity boost I'm seeing is from $COMPANY is
| asking devs to let AI do the design, instead of having a
| designer do it.
|
| I have a dirty secret: I do the design myself.
|
| Productivity gains are still there. People are amazed at
| the "AI".
| cestith wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-ask-good-technical-...
| is a pretty good example.
|
| Going back more than two decades is ESR's "How to Ask Smart
| Questions". http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
| reddit_clone wrote:
| > 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.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| 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.
| cgio wrote:
| Short responses are increasingly becoming a signal of genuine
| human attention.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| 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.
| everyone wrote:
| 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.
| Silasdev wrote:
| 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.
| dude250711 wrote:
| _> 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.
|
| https://frieren.fandom.com/wiki/Demon
|
| _" 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. ..."_
| nosioptar wrote:
| I always get "Foreign Object" by the Mountain Goats stuck in my
| head wheb I deal with people like that...
|
| (Track 31):
|
| https://themountaingoats.bandcamp.com/track/foreign-object-j...
| tristor wrote:
| > 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.
| hahn-kev wrote:
| The malicious answer would be to prompt inject your coworker.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| 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.
| relativeadv wrote:
| 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.
| boerseth wrote:
| 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.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| 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:
| And kitchen knives aren't supposed to be stuck in people.
| zingar wrote:
| We just agreed on our team that we're not posting AI-generated
| text into comms with humans.
| cvoss wrote:
| 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.
| huani wrote:
| its the old rule of reciprocity. If you want to receive
| something, you should match the effort
| sutib wrote:
| If someone manages to devise a way to prove something was written
| by a human they will make a lot of goola
| lenerdenator wrote:
| 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.
| dennysora-main wrote:
| 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
| ycui7 wrote:
| 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.
| teddyh wrote:
| 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:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45936352>)
| aanet wrote:
| Obligatory Marketoonist: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-
| written-ai-read.html
| steelkilt wrote:
| He was handed a gameboy before he could walk, but it didn't
| lessen his humanity. He was handed a smartphone before middle
| school, but his humanity remained intact. He started calling the
| "people" he met on social media his friends, and humanity didn't
| suffer. But alas, using AI is a bridge too far.
| thinkthatover wrote:
| god whenever I hear/see "genuinely" I get so triggered
| paultopia wrote:
| 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
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 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.
| exe34 wrote:
| 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.
| hathawsh wrote:
| 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.
| lacoolj wrote:
| This should be in the HN guidelines
| zbyforgotp wrote:
| 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
| "xxx does not work".
| ezst wrote:
| I was rolling with "don't expect me to read something you haven't
| spent the effort to write", but that works, too.
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