Personally, I’ve been seeing the number of changes for a PR starting to reach into the mid-hundreds now. And fundamentally the developers who make them don’t understand how they work. They often think they do, but then I’ll ask them something about the design and they’ll reply: “IDK Claude did that.”
By no means am I down on AI, but I think proper procedures need to be put into place unless we want a giant bomb in our code base.
AI may be multi-threaded, but there's still a human, global interpreter lock in place. :D
If you put the code up for review, regardless of the source, you should fundamentally understand how it works.
This raises a broader point about AI and productivity: while AI promises parallelism, there's still the human in the middle who is responsible for the code.
The promise of "parallelism" is overstated.
100's of PRs should not be trusted. Or at least not without the c-suite understanding such risks. Maybe you're a small startup looking to get out the door as quickly as possible, so.. YOLO.
But it's going to be a hot mess. A "clean up in aisle nine" level mess.
I strongly agree, however manager^x do not and want see report the massive "productivity" gains.
"Claude did that" is functionally equivalent to "idk I copied that from r/programming" and is totally unacceptable for a professional
I have never seen this standard reached for any real codebase of any size.
Even in projects with a reputation for a strong review culture, people know who the "easy" reviewers are and target them for the dicey stuff (they are often the most overloaded... which only causes them to get more overloaded). I've seen people explicitly state they are just "rubber stamping" PRs. Literally no one reviews every line of third-party dependencies, and especially not when they are updated routinely. I've seen over a million lines of security-sensitive third-party code integrated and pushed out to hundreds of millions of users by a handful of developers in a matter of months. I've seen developers write their new green-field code as a third-party library to circumvent the review process that would have been applied if it had been developed as a series of first-party PRs. None of that had anything to do with AI. It all predated AI coding tools. That is how humans behave.
Does this create ticking time-bombs? It absolutely does. You do the best you can. You triage and deal with the most important things according to your best judgment, and circle back to the rest as time and attention allow. If your judgment is good, it's mostly okay. Some day it might not be. But I do not think that you can argue that the optimal level of risk is zero, outside of a few specialized contexts like space shuttles and nuclear reactors.
I know. It hurts my soul, too. But reality isn't pretty, and worse is better.
If you submit a PR and you yourself can not personally vouch for every line of code as a professional…then you are not a professional. You are a hack.
That is why these code generation tools are so dangerous. Sure, it's theoretically possible that a programmer can rely on them for offering suggestions of new code and then "write" that code for a PR such that full human understanding is maintained and true craft is preserved. The reality is, that's not what's happening. At all. And it's a full-blown crisis.
I know many who have it on from high that they must use AI. One place even has bonuses tied not to productivity, but how much they use AI.
Meanwhile managers ask if AI is writing so much code why aren't they seeing it on topline productivity numbers.
>> I know many who have it on from high that they must use AI. One place even has bonuses tied not to productivity, but how much they use AI.
> How does maximizing AI use prevents developers from reading their code?
In my mind developers are responsible for the code they push, no matter whether it was copy pasted or generated by AI. The comment I responded to specifically said "bonuses tied not to productivity, but how much they use AI". I don't see that using AI for everything automatically implies having no standards or not holding responsibility for code you push.
If managers force developers to purposefully lower standards just to increase PRs per unit of time, that's another story. And in my opinion that's a problem of engeneering & organisational culture, not necessarily a problem with maximizing AI usage. If an org is OK with pushing AI slop no one understands, it will be OK with pushing handwritten slop as well.
That's basically what I'm referring to.
100% my takeaway after trying to parallelize using worktrees. While Claude has no problem managing more than one context instance, I sure as hell do. It’s exhausting, to the point of slowing me down.
Ask pretty much any FOSS developer who has received AI-generated (both code and explanations) PRs on GitHub (and when you complain about these, the author will almost always use the same AI to generate responses) about their experiences. It's a huge time sink if you don't cut them off. There are plenty of projects out there now that have explicit policy documentation against such submissions and even boilerplate messages for rejecting them.
That said, the models, or to be more precise, the tools surrounding it and the craft of interacting with it, are still improving at a pace where I now believe we will get to a point where "hand-crafted" code is the exception in a matter of years.
Nothing can move fast enough to keep up with these hype-fueled TED talk expectations all the way up the chain.
I don't know if there's any solution and I'm sure it's not like this everywhere but I'm also sure I'm not alone. At this point I'm just trying to keep my feet wet on "AI" related projects until the hype dust settles so I can reassess what this industry even is anymore. Maybe it's not too late to get a single subject credential and go teach math or finger painting or something.
That will work, but only until the people filing these PRs go crying to their managers that you refuse to merge any of their code, at which point you'll be given a stern reprimand from your betters to stop being so picky. Have fun vibe-reviewing.
So I guess if you asked Claude why it did that, the truth of it might be "IDK I copy pasted from StackOverflow"
The same stuff pasted with a different sticker. Looks good to me.
You're right, saying you got something off SO would get you laughed out of programming circles back in the day. We should be applying the same shame to people who vibe code, not encourage it, if we want human-parseable and maintainable software.
For whom is this a danger for?
If we're paid to dig ditches and fill them, who are we to question our supreme leaders? They control the purse strings, so of course they know best.
This is a very cruel punishment sometimes used in forced labor camps. You are describing torture.
I've also seen "Ask ChatGPT if you're doing X right?", and basically signing off whatever it recommends without checking
At this point I'm pretty confident I could trojan horse whatever decision I want from certain people by sending enough screenshots of ChatGPT agreeing with me
So, for example, by and large the orgs I've seen chucking Claude PRs over the wall with little review were previously chucking 100% human written PRs over the wall with little review.
Similarly, the teams I see effectively using test suites to guide their code generation are the same teams that effectively use test suites to guide their general software engineering workflows.
Lots of companies just accept bugs as something that happens.
Calendar app for local social clubs? Ship it and fix it later.
B2B payments software that triggers funds transfers? JFC I hope you PIP people for that.
Stack Overflow had enough provenance of copying and pasting. Models may not. Provenance remains a thing or it can add risk to the code.
It's not, and yet I have seen that offered as an excuse several times.
Inb4 the chorus of whining from AI hypists accusing you of being an coastal elitist intellectual jerk for daring to ask that they might want to LEARN something.
I am so over this anti-intellectual garbage. It's gotten to such a ridiculous place in our society and is literally going to get tons of people killed.
No, like you I’m getting more PRs that are less reviewable.
It multiplies what you’re capable of. So you’ll get a LOT of low quality code from devs who aren’t much into quality.
For the most part, I've noticed my LLM-using coworkers producing better PRs, but I haven't noticed anyone producing more.
It does, but that experience was a real thing long before AI-generated code.
"Then your job is to go ask Claude and get back to me. On that note, if that's what I'm paying you for now, I might be paying you too much..."
I'm really interested to see how the intersection of AI and accountability develops over the next few years. It seems like everyone's primary job will effectively be taking accountability for the AI they're driving, and the pay will be a function of how much and what kind of accountability you're taking and the overall stakes.
Not meaning to put on a holier-than-thou hat here. But I hated this many times already. E.g. having to approve code that contains useless comments that were clearly generated by AI, but on the other hand, it's nitpicking to bring it up during review...
If my colleagues would do that more often and for more parts of the code, that's where I really start getting inclined to look for a new job.
The science is by no means conclusive. A joint Harvard / MIT study found developers completed tasks up to 50% faster [0]!
I would want someone entirely off of my team if they did that. Anyone who pushes code they don't understand at least well enough to answer "What does that do?" and "Why did you do it that way?" deserves for their PR to be flat out rejected in whole, not just altered.
Could this be fixed by adjusting how tickets are scoped?
When computers give different answers to the same questions it's a fundamental shift in how we work with them.
At one of my jobs, the PRs are far less reviewable, but now the devs write tests when they didn’t used to bother. I’ve always viewed reviewing PRs as work without recognition, so I never did much of it anyway, but but now that there are passing tests, I often approve without more than a cursory skim.
So yes, it has made their work more productive for me to get off my plane.
Mostly blindly approving PRs mainly because they now contain some form of equally AI-generated tests is exactly the producticity fallacy that's the issue here.
Using AI tooling means, at least in part, betting on the future.
It means betting on a particular LLM centric vision of the future.
I’m still agnostic on that. I think LLMs allow for the creation of a lot of one off scripts and things for people that wouldn’t otherwise be coding, but I have yet to be convinced that more AI usage in a sufficiently senior software development team is more valuable than the traditional way of doing things.
I think there’s a fundamental necessity for a human to articulate what a given piece of software should do with a high level of specificity that can’t ever be avoided. The best you can do is piggy back off of higher level language and abstractions that guess what the specifics should be, but I don’t think it’s realistic to think all combinations of all business logic and ui can be boiled down to common patterns that an LLM could infer. And even if that were true, people get bored/like novelty enough that they’ll always want new human created stuff to shove into the training set.
The probability of plain english being correctly translated to code depends on existing code and documented abstractions describing lower level functionality.
Humans, for example, aren't a layer of abstraction. Having a team of engineers doesn't enable you to say "build X" and just forget about it.
Yet HN has what feels like one blog post or article to that effect every day. Some senior person describing their workflow, arguing that this makes them 10x of before.
It's refreshing to get the other perspective now and then.
The problem is people trying to make the models do things that are too close to their limit. You should use LLMs for things they can ace already, not waste time trying to get it to invent some new algorithm. If I don't 0-3 shot a problem then I will just either do it manually or not do it.
Similarly to giving up on a Google search that you try a few times and nothing useful comes in the first few prompts. You don't keep at it the whole afternoon.
Tedious, repetitive stuff that you'd typically write a throwaway script for is one good use case for AI for me. This doesn't come up very often for me, however. But this morning I needed to update a bunch of import statements in TypeScript files to use relative paths instead of referencing a library name and Cursor did that for me quickly and easily without me needing to write a script.
I've also found that if you're unsure how to solve a problem within an existing codebase, or you're about to go down a rabbit hole of studying documentation to figure out how to wire something up, an LLM can get you up and running with code examples a bit quicker.
But if I already know, high level, how I'm going to solve something then the whole "needing to review the AI code" part of the workflow more than eats up any time savings. And the parallelism thing is just a ton of context shifting to me. Each time I need to go back to an agent to review what it did, it takes me away from the deep focus on a domain problem that I was focused on, and there's a good 20 - 30 minutes of productivity lost by switching back and forth between just two tasks.
A good code review and edit to remove the excess verbosity, and you got a feature done real fast.
Ask it for something at or above its limit then the code is very difficult to debug, difficult to understand has potentially misleading comments, and more. Knowing how to work with these overly confident coworkers is definitely a skill. I feel it varies from significantly from model to model as well.
Its often difficult to task other programmers with tasks at or above their limits too.
As advertised or at least strongly implied by the companies that own the models.
I'm not a programmer but from time to time would make automations or small scripts to make my job easier.
LLMs have made much more complex automations and scripts possible while making it dead simple to create the scripts I used to make.
> But here’s the kicker: we were told AI would free us up for “higher-level work.” What actually happened? We just found more work to fill the space. That two-hour block AI created by automating your morning reports? It’s now packed with three new meetings.
But then a few sentences later, she argues that tools made us less productive.
> when developers used AI tools, they took 19% longer to complete tasks than without AI. Even more telling: the developers estimated they were 20% faster with AI—they were completely wrong about their own productivity.
Then she switches back to saying it saves us time but cognitive debt!
> If an AI tool saves you 30 minutes but leaves you mentally drained and second-guessing everything, that’s not productivity—that’s cognitive debt.
I think you have to pick one, or just admit you don't like AI because it makes you feel icky for whatever reason so you're going to throw every type of argument you can against it.
Well, that is a general phenomenon of technology. Technology does indeed often save time at first (in the short-term) but then compensates in a bad way and gives us more work in the long term. Pretty much every technology past a certain point of sophistication does this:
- Smartphones immediately can help us organize stuff, but then they also make it easier for people to call you when you don't want, you get more spam, etc.
- Cars make it easier to get from A to B but then in the long run now we have to spend countless years of work to clean up the climate/environemtn
- Computers make typing and storing information more efficient but now we have to spend countless hours on securing them
The bottom line is that efficiency increases from a technological creation point of view but life simplicity decreases, in general.
The right answer to this is: speak up for yourself. Dumping your feelings into HN or Reddit or your blog can be a temporary coping mechanism but it doesn't solve the problem. If you are legitimately working your tail off and not able to keep up with your workload, tell your manager or clients. Tactfully, of course. If they won't listen, then its time to move on. There are reasonable people/companies to work with out there, but they sometimes take some effort to find.
This is basically the definition of increased productivity and efficiency. Doing more stuff in the same amount of time. What I tell people who are anxious about whether their job might be automated away by AI is this:
We will never run out of the problems that need solving. The types of problems you spend your time solving will change. The key is to adapt your process to allocate your time to solving the right kinds of problems. You don’t want the be the person taking an hour to do arithmetic by hand, when you have access to spreadsheets.
And this has always been the case throughout all of human history.
The purpose of AI is supposed to *make a few people richer*! Not take away the boredom from tasks. That's only a side effect of it used to sell it.
You have to hire new ones as they leave.
All of the juniors I have hired in the last 10 years are now seniors, still at my company.
I'm not sure that Claude saves me time -- I just spent my weekend working on a Claude Code Audio hook with Claude which I obviously wouldn't have worked on elsewise, and that's hardly the gardening I intended to do ... but man it was fun and now my CC sessions are a lot easier to track by ear!
The most junior dev on my team was tasked with setting up a repo for a new service. The service is not due for many many months so this was an opportunity to learn. What we got was a giant PR with hundreds of new configurations no one has heard of. It's not bad, it's just that we don't know what each conf does. Naturally we asked him to explain or give an overview, he couldn't. Well because he fed the whole thing to an LLM and it spat out the repo. He even had fixes for bugs we didn't know we had in other repos. He didn't know either. But it took the rest of the team digging in to figure out what's going on.
I'm not against using LLM, but now I've added a new step in the process. If anyone makes giant PRs, they'll also have to make a presentation to give everyone an overview. With that in mind, it forces devs to actually read through the code they generate and understand it.
Don't allow giant PRs without a damn good reason for them. Incremental steps, with testing (automated or human) to verify their correctness, that take you from a known-good-to-known-good state.
Investment capital isn't zero-sum...if/when AI generates outsized/large returns, it actually brings more money into the entire VC ecosystem. LPs who 10x their AI investments don't exactly hoard that cash, they reinvest and often diversify into other sectors.
Every major tech wave creates huge downstream opportunities. The internet "bubble" didn't just benefit search engines...it spawned e-com, SaaS, fintech, etc. AI is doing the same thing with robotics, new semiconductors, data infrastructure, and I'm sure other categories that don't even exist yet.
Also investors know they need portfolio diversification. Even AI-focused VCs are actively looking for contrarian bets in undervalued sectors precisely because there's less competition there right now.
Plus, AI advancement should (yes, I know there's hype and theses that may not play out) accelerate innovation everywhere else. Example: A biotech startup today has access to AI tools that were Google-only five years ago. This makes non-AI startups more attractive, not less.
We saw identical complaints during the dotcom era about "real businesses" getting ignored, but that period actualy coincided with growth across enterprise software, telco, and tons of other sectors.
That's a BIG if/when. "AI" is just as likely to produce huge court cases (already is) that result in massive penalties. Google's "AI" summary is bordering on a liability right now, not to all the copyrighted material used to train the "AI".
>Plus, AI advancement should (yes, I know there's hype and theses that may not play out) accelerate innovation everywhere else. Example: A biotech startup today has access to AI tools that were Google-only five years ago.
Okay, so these tools have been around 5 years - where's the panacea of amazing breakthroughs enabled by "AI"? We've heard plenty about how "AI" is going to be a game changer, but after 5 years the game still seems basically the same.
>We saw identical complaints during the dotcom era about "real businesses" getting ignored,
The main thing "AI" today has in common with the "dotcom era" is that they were/are both bubbles, and just like the dotcom bubble burst, the "AI" bubble is very likely to also pop.
I just hope it pops before the power needs of "AI" raise the global temperature another 1C or 2C.
And that was before Claude Code.
It’s a shame too because it really could have been something so much more amazing. I’d imagine higher education would shift to how it used to be: a past-time for bored elites. We would probably see a large reduction in the middle class and its eventual destruction. First they went for manufacturing with its strong unions, now they go for the white-collar worker who has little solidarity for his common man (see lack of unions and ethics in our STEM field; most likely because we thought we could never be made redundant). Field by field the middle class will be destroyed and the lower class in thrall of addictive social media, substances, and the illusion of selection into the influencer petty-elite (which remain compliant because they don’t offer value proportional to the bribes they receive). The elites will have recreated the dynamic that existed for most of human history. Final point, see the obsession of current elites in using artificial insemination to create a reliable and durable contingent of heirs. Something previous rulers could only dream about in history.
It disgusts me and pisses me off so much.
It's like buying a trinket just because it's cheap. It's still ultimately wasteful.
Think about it this way. We all make decisions like this pretty much every day, but I am especially careful with them in my personal life where time is limited and sacred: "What amount of time or money (X) am I willing to spend to get something (Y)?"
There have been many times that X has been "too much," until I later discover some new tool, library, or technique (or simply a price drop) that reduces X below the threshold of pulling the trigger. AI is that new tool for a lot of people and contexts.
If my barrier to some cool new one-off home automation feature is something like, "I would need to know Ruby but I don't know it and don't have time or desire to learn it," then I can have an LLM do the heavy lifting in a tiny fraction of the time it would take me to learn. Of course the feature needs to be something straightforward enough for the LLM to handle, and you have to be able to test it. And it goes without saying that since I can't properly review the code, I wouldn't use it for something that could cause a lot of damage or a security issue. But there are lots of tools/areas where that is not applicable. (Not all code needs to be bullet-proof and in reality, almost none of it is, even when it should be.)
Also if you buy an ultimately useless trinket, well that's just life. Everything we do can be considered 'ultimately' useless.
Dumb philosophy. Some things in life are at least worthwhile, like spending time with friends and making the lives of others better. But increasing efficiency for intellectual stimulation in a narrow domain truly useless and shows how pathological we have become.
Fact is, there is some level of meaning in life if you accept there to be any meaning at all, and making mindless diversions certainly isn't within that domain.
Those are good things, but they are not the only things. Life is short, but there is room for "mindless diversions," as you phrase it. Without this, there would be no creativity, no craftsmanship, no art. Is it not also important to enrich oneself with hobbies and side-projects? Further, there is no authority who can make the judgement call on what is "worthwhile" to spend time on and what is not.
Your comment reeks of projection.
It's not binary. There is nothing wrong with mindless diversions, but there is a healthy proportion of them. And when it becomes pathological (i.e. when AI allows spending a disproportionate amount of time on them), then it's a serious problem.
Of course, at its inception, AI will mainly be seen as something that can help improve efficiency. Same with the smartphone: it was an entire optional tool that was mainly beneficial. But after this initial inception, technology tends to grow, and now smartphones for example are often mandatory due to 2FA, or at least difficult to avoid. And they constantly find new ways to bother people.
So for now, AI can be helpful for some, but it will grow, become more entrenched and insidious, and in lots of cases entirely replace people or at least be annoying and difficult to get rid of.
It doesn't make sense to argue for AI by stating its benefits in its nascent stages. Babies are all basically innocent creatures that bring emotional benefits but some can grow up to be killers, and this is what will happen with AI.
AI will help close the gap between the people who were privilidged and given the environment to learn versus those who didn't.
However, beyond that I have absolutely no idea what will happen because I had a friend sending me porn that grok generated (the moderation is a joke). AI girlfriends will definitely be a thing and a lot of people will use those services, but I can't really wrap my head around what that entails for the future.
Unfortunately, it is always a deliberate lie by the people who stand to gain from the new technology. Anyone who has thought about it for five seconds knows that this is not how capitalism works. Productivity gains are almost immediately absorbed and become the new normal. Firms that operate at the old level of productivity get washed out.
I simply can't believe that we're still falling for this. But let's hold out hope. Maybe AGI is just around the corner, and literally everyone in the world will spend our time sipping margaritas on the beach while we count our UBI. Certainly AI could never accelerate wealth concentration and inequality, right? RIGHT?
At first, we spend our time one way (say eight hours, just to pick a number). Then we get the tools to do all of that in six hours. Then when job seeking and hiring, we get one worker willing to work six hours and another willing to work eight, so the eight-hour worker gets the job, all else equal. Labor is a marketplace, so we work as much as we're willing to in aggregate, which is roughly constant over time, so efficiency will never free up individuals' time.
In the context of TFA, it means we just shift our time to "harder" work (in the sense of work that AI can't do yet).
There are more workers than CEOs and CEOs don't create the value, the workers do. What CEOs largely do is monetize and take credit for all the value creation.
I don't think things can continue along the current unsustainable path in the US. Something will break; hopefully in a sensible way and not the historical pitchforks and arson.
Do you think people get hired by bidding for number of hours they want to work?
Here is an example.
I decided to create a new app, so I write down a brief of what it should do, ask AI to create a longer readme file about the platform along with design, sequence diagram, and suggested technologies.
I review that document, see if there is anything I can amend, then ask AI for the implementation plan.
Up until this point, this would probably increased the time I usually use to describe the platform in writing. But realistically, designing and thinking about systems were never that fast. I would have to think about use cases, imagine workflows in my mind, do pen and paper diagrams which I don’t think any of the productivity reports are covering.
I'm not sure if this is caused by AI, or by the nature of business or the culture of many companies. Replacing AI with any automations, wouldn't it be the same result?
Marx: workers sell their capacity to work for a fixed period, and any productivity improvements within that time become surplus value captured by capital.
AI tools are just the latest mechanism for extracting more output from the same wage. The real issue isn’t the technology—it’s that employees can’t capture gains from their own efficiency improvements. Until compensation models shift from time-based to outcome-based, every productivity breakthrough just makes us more profitable to employ, not more prosperous ourselves.
It’s the Industrial Revolution all over again and we’re the Luddites
Not quite right. Total Value remains the same before and after increase in productivity, assuming the labor force remains constant. But more use-value is created in the same period of time.
At the beginning, this is good for the employer, because the new socially necessary labor time has not been internalized, so the output can be sold for a price corresponding to its old Value. Maybe a bit less, to undercut competitors.
Eventually though, as competition adopts the new technique, everyone attempts to undercut each other’s prices, adjusting until prices correspond to the new Value.
So, they also benefit developers that become solopreneurs.
So they increase the next-best alternative for developers compared to work as employees.
What happens when you improve the next-best alternative?
> AI tools are just the latest mechanism for extracting more output from the same wage.
The whole history of software development has been rapid introduction of additional automation (because no field has been more the focus of software development than itself), and looking at the history of developer salaries, that has not been a process of "extracting more output from the same wage". Yes, output per $ wage has gone up, but real wages per hour or day worked for developers have also gone up, and done so faster than wages across the economy generally. It is true and problematic that the degree of capitalism in the structure of the modern mixed economy means that the gains of productivity go disproportionately to capital, but it is simply false to say that they go exclusively to capital across the board, and it is particularly easy to see that this has specifically been false in the case of productivity gains from further automation in software development.
Eventually they will be forced to care when things get bad enough -- and it's definitely trending that way fast [1]. But not today and not tomorrow.
"While the cotton gin made the process of cleaning cotton significantly faster, it ultimately led to an increase in the demand for enslaved labor, not a decrease."
A lot of automation leads to more work for someone. Reduces some jobs, and piles on others. Maybe 12 union jobs are removed, but then keeping the robots running falls on 1-2 IT staff.
Edit: "amirhirsch" user probably explained this better than me in an above comment.
you will never be given your time back by an employer. you have to take it. you might be able to ask for it, but it won't be freely given, whether or not you become more efficient. LLM chatbots and agents are, in this sense, just another tool that changes our relationship to the work we do (but never our relationship to work).
This is what the whole four-day workweek movement is about; to reclaim some of that productivity increase as personal time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-day_workweek
Economist Keynes predicted one century ago that the workweek would drop to 15 hours due to rising productivity. It has not happened for social reasons.
I don't know what's going to happen when humans become redundant; that's an incipient issue we'll have to grapple with.
Software development as a career will evaporate in the next decade, as will most "knowledge" work such as general medicine, law, and teaching. Surgeons and dentists will continue a bit longer.
Bottom line, most of us will be doing chores while the machines do all the production and creative work.
"But here's the kicker"
"It's not x. It's y."
"The companies that foo? They bar."
Em-dashes galore.
I'm either hypersensitized, seeing ghosts, or this article got the "yo claude make it pop" treatment. It's sad, but anything overly polished immediately triggers some "is this slop or an original thought actually worth my time" response.
New technology often homogenizes and makes things boring for awhile.