5 ms·

If you dont take a stand and refuse to clean their mess, aren't you part of the problem? No self respecting proponent of AI enabled development should suggest t

If you dont take a stand and refuse to clean their mess, aren't you part of the problem? No self respecting proponent of AI enabled development should suggest that the engineers generating the code are still not personally responsible for its quality.

borski 7mo ago
Came here to say this. The right solution to this is still the same as it always was - teach the juniors what good code looks like, and how to write it. Over time, they will learn to clean up the LLM’s messes on their own, improving both jobs.
tenacious_tuna 7mo ago
Ultimately that's only an option if you can sustain the impact to your career (not getting promoted, or getting fired). My org (publicly traded, household name, <5k employees) is all-in on AI with the goal of having 100% of our code AI generated within the next year. We have all the same successes and failures as everyone else, there's nothing special about our case, but our technical leadership is fundamentally convinced that this is both viable and necessary, and will not be told otherwise. People who disagree at all levels of seniority have been made to leave the organization. Practically speaking, there's no sexy pitch you can make about doing quality grunt work. I've made that mistake virtually every time I've joined a company: I make performance improvements, I stabilize CI, I improve code readability, remove compiler warnings, you name it: but if you're not shipping features, if you're not driving the income needle, you have a much more difficult time framing your value to a non-engineering audience, who ultimately sign the paychecks. Obviously this varies wildly by organization, but it's been true everywhere I've worked to varying degrees. Some companies (and bosses) are more self-aware than others, which can help for framing the conversation (and retaining one's sanity), but at the end of the day if I'm making a stand about how bad AI quality is, but my AI-using coworker has shipped six medium sized features, I'm not winning that argument. It doesn't help that I think non-engineers view code quality as a technical boogeyman and an internal issue to their engineering divisions. Our technical leadership's attitude towards our incidents has been "just write better code," which... Well. I don't need to explain the ridiculousness of that statement in this forum, but it undermines most people's criticism of AI. Sure, it writes crap code and misses business requirements; but in the eyes of my product team? That's just dealing with engineers in general. It's not like they can tell the difference.
- mentalgear 7mo ago
  Unfortunately not many companies seem to require engineers to cycle between "feature" and "maintainability" work - hence those looking for the low-hanging fruits and know how to virtue signal seem to build their career on "features" while engineers passionate about correct solutions are left to pay for it while also labelled as "inefficient" by management. It's all a clown show, especially now with vibe-coding - no wonder we have big companies having had multiple incidents since vibing started taking off.
  - caminante 7mo ago
    Culture and accountability problems aren't limited to software. It's best to sniff out values mismatches ASAP and then decide whether you can tolerate some discomfort to achieve your personal goals.
- whiplash451 7mo ago
  Shipping “quality only” work for a long time can be stressful for your colleagues and the product teams. You’re much better off mixing both (quality work and product features).
  - tenacious_tuna 7mo ago
    > Shipping “quality only” work for a long time can be stressful for your colleagues and the product teams. I buried the lede a bit, but my frustration has been feeling like _nobody_ on my team prioritizes quality and instead optimizes for feature velocity, which then leaves some poor sod (me) to pick up the pieces to keep everything ticking over... but then I'm not shipping features. At the end of the day if my value system is a mismatch from my employer's that's going to be a problem for me, it just baffles me that I keep ending up in what feels like an unsustainable situation that nobody else blinks at.
    - whiplash451 7mo ago
      That's a different situation than the one I had in mind. I was assuming a sane culture that balances shipping features and quality work. What you're describing sounds like a serious value function mismatch.
oh_my_goodness 7mo ago
"aren't you part of the problem?" Yes? In the same way any victim of shoddy practices is "part of the problem"?
- ramraj07 7mo ago
  Employees, especially ones as well leveraged and overpaid as software engineers, are not victims. They can leave. They _should_ leave. Great engineers are still able to bet better paying jobs all the time.
  - oh_my_goodness 7mo ago
    Employees are not victims. Sounds like a universal principle.
  - Aurornis 7mo ago
    > Great engineers are still able to bet better paying jobs all the time I know a lot of people who tried playing this game frequently during COVID, then found themselves stuck in a bad place when the 0% money ran out and companies weren’t eager in hiring someone whose resume had a dozen jobs in the past 6 years.
  - queenkjuul 7mo ago
    You obviously haven't gone job hunting in 2026 I hope you get the privilege soon
Aurornis 7mo ago
> and refuse to clean their mess You can should speak up when tasks are poorly defined, underestimated, or miscommunicated. Try to flat out “refuse” assigned work and you’ll be swept away in the next round of layoffs, replaced by someone who knows how to communicate and behave diplomatically.
- arwhatever 7mo ago
  ramraj07 went on to clarify that they were advocating for putting the onus for cleanup back on mess generators. They clearly were not advocating for flat out refusing.

borski 7mo ago

Came here to say this. The right solution to this is still the same as it always was - teach the juniors what good code looks like, and how to write it. Over time, they will learn to clean up the LLM’s messes on their own, improving both jobs.

tenacious_tuna 7mo ago

Ultimately that's only an option if you can sustain the impact to your career (not getting promoted, or getting fired). My org (publicly traded, household name, <5k employees) is all-in on AI with the goal of having 100% of our code AI generated within the next year. We have all the same successes and failures as everyone else, there's nothing special about our case, but our technical leadership is fundamentally convinced that this is both viable and necessary, and will not be told otherwise. People who disagree at all levels of seniority have been made to leave the organization. Practically speaking, there's no sexy pitch you can make about doing quality grunt work. I've made that mistake virtually every time I've joined a company: I make performance improvements, I stabilize CI, I improve code readability, remove compiler warnings, you name it: but if you're not shipping features, if you're not driving the income needle, you have a much more difficult time framing your value to a non-engineering audience, who ultimately sign the paychecks. Obviously this varies wildly by organization, but it's been true everywhere I've worked to varying degrees. Some companies (and bosses) are more self-aware than others, which can help for framing the conversation (and retaining one's sanity), but at the end of the day if I'm making a stand about how bad AI quality is, but my AI-using coworker has shipped six medium sized features, I'm not winning that argument. It doesn't help that I think non-engineers view code quality as a technical boogeyman and an internal issue to their engineering divisions. Our technical leadership's attitude towards our incidents has been "just write better code," which... Well. I don't need to explain the ridiculousness of that statement in this forum, but it undermines most people's criticism of AI. Sure, it writes crap code and misses business requirements; but in the eyes of my product team? That's just dealing with engineers in general. It's not like they can tell the difference.

mentalgear 7mo ago
Unfortunately not many companies seem to require engineers to cycle between "feature" and "maintainability" work - hence those looking for the low-hanging fruits and know how to virtue signal seem to build their career on "features" while engineers passionate about correct solutions are left to pay for it while also labelled as "inefficient" by management. It's all a clown show, especially now with vibe-coding - no wonder we have big companies having had multiple incidents since vibing started taking off.
- caminante 7mo ago
  Culture and accountability problems aren't limited to software. It's best to sniff out values mismatches ASAP and then decide whether you can tolerate some discomfort to achieve your personal goals.
whiplash451 7mo ago
Shipping “quality only” work for a long time can be stressful for your colleagues and the product teams. You’re much better off mixing both (quality work and product features).
- tenacious_tuna 7mo ago
  > Shipping “quality only” work for a long time can be stressful for your colleagues and the product teams. I buried the lede a bit, but my frustration has been feeling like _nobody_ on my team prioritizes quality and instead optimizes for feature velocity, which then leaves some poor sod (me) to pick up the pieces to keep everything ticking over... but then I'm not shipping features. At the end of the day if my value system is a mismatch from my employer's that's going to be a problem for me, it just baffles me that I keep ending up in what feels like an unsustainable situation that nobody else blinks at.
  - whiplash451 7mo ago
    That's a different situation than the one I had in mind. I was assuming a sane culture that balances shipping features and quality work. What you're describing sounds like a serious value function mismatch.

oh_my_goodness 7mo ago

"aren't you part of the problem?" Yes? In the same way any victim of shoddy practices is "part of the problem"?

ramraj07 7mo ago
Employees, especially ones as well leveraged and overpaid as software engineers, are not victims. They can leave. They _should_ leave. Great engineers are still able to bet better paying jobs all the time.
- oh_my_goodness 7mo ago
  Employees are not victims. Sounds like a universal principle.
- Aurornis 7mo ago
  > Great engineers are still able to bet better paying jobs all the time I know a lot of people who tried playing this game frequently during COVID, then found themselves stuck in a bad place when the 0% money ran out and companies weren’t eager in hiring someone whose resume had a dozen jobs in the past 6 years.
- queenkjuul 7mo ago
  You obviously haven't gone job hunting in 2026 I hope you get the privilege soon

Aurornis 7mo ago

> and refuse to clean their mess You can should speak up when tasks are poorly defined, underestimated, or miscommunicated. Try to flat out “refuse” assigned work and you’ll be swept away in the next round of layoffs, replaced by someone who knows how to communicate and behave diplomatically.

arwhatever 7mo ago
ramraj07 went on to clarify that they were advocating for putting the onus for cleanup back on mess generators. They clearly were not advocating for flat out refusing.