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I have a coworker who I suspect has been using LLMs to write most of his code for him. He wrote multiple PRs with thousands of lines of code over a month. Me a
by amrocha 2y ago
I have a coworker who I suspect has been using LLMs to write most of his code for him. He wrote multiple PRs with thousands of lines of code over a month.
Me and the other senior dev spent weeks reviewing these PRs. Here’s what we found:
- The feature wasn’t built to spec, so even though it worked in general the details were all wrong
- The code was sloppy and didn’t adhere to the repos guidelines
- He couldn’t explain why he did things a certain way versus another, so reviews took a long time
- The code worked for the happy path, and errored for everything else
Eventually this guy got moved to a different team and we closed his PRs and rewrote the feature in less than a week.
This was an awful experience. If you told me that this is the future of software I’d laugh you out of the room, because engineers make enough money and have enough leverage to just quit. If you force engineers to work this way, all the good ones will quit and retire. So you’re gonna be stuck with the guys who can’t write code reviewing code they don’t understand.
- janalsncm 2y agoIn the short term, I share your opinion. LLMs have automated the creation of slop that resembles code. In the long term, we SWEs (like other industries) have to own the fact that there’s a huge target on our backs, and aside from hubris there’s no law of nature or man preventing people smarter than us from building robots that do our jobs faster than us.
- amrocha 2y agoThat’s called class consciousness, and I agree, and I think most people have already realized companies are not their friend after the last two years of layoffs. But like I said, I’m not worried about it in the imminent future, and I have enough leverage to turn down any jobs that want me to work in that way.