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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

• wahnfrieden 4mo ago
  why leave comments intended for your human colleague when they will only forward them to the bot? why not speak directly to the bot yourself instead? then you can drop pretenses and get to the point I find this to be a new variant of the old behavior where a colleague comments on a typo in a PR, and the team later moans about laborious back and forth for small nitpicks, instead of simply editing the typo right there (and perhaps leaving a note that they did so)
  • liveoneggs 4mo ago
    yeah I have this happen to me. I occasionally get screenshots of claude sent to me!
    • maccard 4mo ago
      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 4mo ago
        "why are you such a drag on team morale?", "why are you invalidating your colleagues learning experiences?" "Next time you do this, HR will have to step in" etc etc. There's no justice in this world.
        • maccard 4mo ago
          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 4mo ago
            for me it's actually my boss
            • maccard 4mo ago
              Ah. Well that’s a problem. My advise is either manage up, accept fate or move team
  • doctorpangloss 4mo ago
    let's take the two stories to management: "I'm writing tons of code, and the process is stumbling where the guy whose job it is to review code isn't reviewing it." "I'm not reviewing code." Sometimes I wonder: how does someone go and think so much about their coworkers, and never once think about how they themselves look? Even if I sympathize with the people complaining about their poorly chosen GitHub-based workflow - whose purpose is to let pull requests languish, for the most part - and how they stumble when overwhelmed with solutions. It's obvious to me, that the people who complain the loudest about the anti-sociality of LLM authored code in their precious harmonious low-effort workplace status quo: they are projecting.
    • cool_dude85 4mo ago
      Imagine you are a restaurant reviewer. Your job is unquestionably to go to restaurants, order and eat food, and write a review. The restaurant's job is to provide you food to eat and review. You go to a new restaurant, and order some dishes, and one of the plates your server brings out is a big ol pile of dog shit. Who's being anti-social in this situation? The restaurant is doing its job and all they're asking is that you do yours. On the other hand, you have certain expectations about what you order from the restaurant and they're not being met. Who's anti-social?
      • carlosjobim 4mo ago
        He's not bringing you a pile of dog shit. He's bringing you some food he went to the restaurant next doors to get. How do you review it?
        • filleduchaos 4mo ago
          I cannot think of a single actual food critic that would consider it acceptable for a restaurant to serve a dish for review that they went to the restaurant next door to get. If the critic wanted to eat at/review that restaurant they would simply have gone there instead.
          • 4mo ago
  • danaris 4mo ago
    Because it doesn't matter what you say to the bot. You might as well have a conversation with yourself about the PR. The bot isn't making decisions. It's not choosing to submit extensive PRs with bad code. The colleague is the one who needs to actually learn something here, and the problem is that confronting him about it directly is widely considered to be bad form. This is, of course, a deeply unhealthy aspect of our corporate culture. We need to be more open to honest communication, even when it's either uncomplimentary of one of the people involved, or counter to the prevailing opinions within the company.
• CoastalCoder 4mo ago
  It sounds like one potential interpretation of his behavior is that he values his own time more than your time. I wonder if that's occurred to him.
  • voidfunc 4mo ago
    AI and companies reward sociopathic behavior. When he eventually complains to his boss that his work isn't being merged and it's been done for days/weeks/months that will filter up and look bad on the people holding him up.
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
      • cindyllm 4mo ago
        [dead]
    • gonzalohm 4mo ago
      At that point then disable merge checks and let them merge without a review. If there is a problem it's on them
      • cncjvu7 4mo ago
        This is my current strategy, it's working great. Half the team has been fired for slop and the other half got fired for not doing anything.
    • manyatoms 4mo ago
      I'm sure this person's manager knows that having trouble getting PRs reviewed can (but not always) be a signal of a deeper problem. It could be that no one one the team knows the domain, it could be that no one like the person, but most likely it's that the PRs are frequently bad and no one wants to bother.
    • renegade-otter 4mo ago
• Jimmc414 4mo ago
  Fight fire with fire. Ask Fable to conduct an adversarial /ultareview of their PR and send the same wall of text back to them. If there are excessive defects, ask them in standup if they actually reviewed the PR themselves before sending it. If there 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 4mo ago
    > Ask Fable to conduct an adversarial /ultareview of their PR and send the same wall of text back to them. This won't help. Your wall of text will just get fed right back into the LLM.
    • Jensson 4mo ago
      It will help if your wall of text cost less tokens than theirs, they will run out before you do if you have the same company quota per person.
      • deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      • Telemakhos 4mo ago
        I'm not sure what the right vocabulary would be to describe this, but this sounds more like the calculations behind nuclear war than a healthy collegiality or cooperative work relationship. This sets up a competition to determine a loser based on resource scarcity, not a way to achieve mutual goals to advance the organization's goals.
        • toomuchtodo 4mo ago
          “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-productive-its-making-them-busier https://leaddev.com/ai/ai-isnt-making-developers-more-produc... - June 11th, 2026 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
• glennericksen 4mo ago
  I like this rule of thumb: Spend more effort producing the work than it takes for someone else to consume it.
  • coopernusbaum 4mo ago
    [flagged]
  • pjio 4mo ago
    I like this rule and hopefully adhere to it myself often enough.
• moomoo11 4mo ago
  just fire him lol sounds like a nightmare
• emodendroket 4mo ago
  It's not always feasible of course but I think there is real, worthwhile discipline in trying to get change requests small and it matters more with agents. It's very easy to let it balloon into gazillions of files and lines.
• deadbabe 4mo ago
  why not just approve the PRs with little more than a cursory glance? One of two things will happen: 1. Things start breaking, proving AI generated code sucks and the individual spamming these PRs is incompetent. 2. The code works fine and reviews are unnecessary for anything other than liability concerns.
  • hypfer 4mo ago
    Some of us actually take the "engineering" in "software engineering" seriously. That includes taking responsibility and accountability so that the software doesn't become a sad and dangerous mess. If we want to be an engineering discipline, just yoloing in production is not going to cut it.
    • deadbabe 4mo ago
      This no longer works when bad faith actors will push code straight from LLMs with little review, and respond to your comments with LLM responses. They will constantly leave you with the responsibility of verifying the output. You are the human in their loop. This is a brutal asymmetry. In the past, at least you knew a person probably spent more time handwriting code than you will spend reviewing it. This no longer applies, now the reviewer can easily spend more time than the author.
      • hypfer 4mo ago
        Oh but it does. The thing that makes it scale is to default to "no" and require the other party to convince you of "yes". Just put the burden of proof where it belongs. If they don't manage, then that's their problem. Communicating this in a way that is viable for a business scenario certainly comes with its own difficulties, but that is a solvable problem. In fact, you can use AI to stress test your communication there. Just throw what you want to say at the AI but don't tell it that it is you who wrote it. Then tune the input until it stops saying that you're the problem and starts agreeing with you. Highly recommend. It's a perfect emotion-driven cargo-culting normie simulator that never calls HR on you.
• AussieWog93 4mo ago
  Have you spoken to him about this? If he's clueless enough to send AI responses to human messages, he's probably clueless enough to not realise why people don't do that.
  • RobotToaster 4mo ago
    Better yet, get Claude to speak to him about it.
• jillesvangurp 4mo ago
  In big software teams, the bottleneck is team communication. I've run big and small teams. If I want to speed things up, I remove people from the team. Everything gets easier. This has worked amazingly well every time I've done this over the past decades. Removing people doesn't have to mean firing them necessarily. Splitting teams is a good reflex. But of course the people you remove from a team are typically not the best performers. I was discussing this with a friend of mine who runs a small company. Exact same thing. He reduced the team size by 1 and the velocity went up almost instantly. This person was a bottleneck in the team and was slowing down people around him. After identifying the problem, solving it unblocked the rest of the team. This was true long before AI. With AI the difference is just a lot bigger. It exposes team inefficiencies quite mercilessly. We have a big glaring issue with the current AI tools not being to suitable for usage by multiple users. All interactions are one on one. Which means hand offs between tools and people are bottle necked on people communicating with each other. So, any issues there with people delaying, gate keeping, etc. become very visible. The sentiment of pushing back on AI is understandable but probably not a productive reflex. We need to find more effective ways on staying on top of massive amounts of changes. It's not going to slow down and insisting on manually reviewing all code is not going to be a long term sustainable way of developing software. It simply does not scale. I'd question the added value of manual PR reviews at this point. Are they finding real issues? Are we valuing those issues correctly? Could we come up with automated ways to find and fix those same issues? There are a lot of open questions about how we are going to do this. But no question about the notion that we need to up our game on this front.
  • shinryuu 4mo ago
    Honestly, we should make a world that is enjoyable and productive for humans. Not relentlessly optimizing for agents.
  • bxk76 4mo ago
    Efficiency is not magic. Its bounded. Above and below limits the environment can sustain it, systems will destabalize. If All the Great White Sharks magically get more efficient at hunting over night ecosystem will collapse. Individuals and teams have never scaled at this speed to the levels they have. And there is no signal at system wide level that a sustainable limit has been crossed. So People will happily believe things are getting more efficient at individual/team scale while at system scale things get more fragile. This is why we ended up with central banks deciding interest rates and controlling money supply. Before that any one could print cash. They all thought they were great efficient geniuses. The chimp troupe us not prepared for stuff that effects the entire system.
• beebmam 4mo ago
  Human PR review is a process smell
  • reverius42 4mo ago
    This would sound crazy in 2025 or prior, but I'm on board. It's silly to have humans reviewing code that a human didn't even write.
• goobatrooba 4mo ago
  An interesting question to him and management might be what his own role is now and whether he's still needed. If he's not doing any reviews then you could yourself directly prompt the code and review.
  • cameldrv 4mo ago
    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 4mo ago
  I can't imagine working for a place that has a big bucket of PRs that either get reviewed or languish for some amount of time based on who feels like reviewing them. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, just that everywhere I've ever worked, there are expected features with priorities and timelines and some project manager or product person breathing down your neck to get them out the door.
• crjohns648 4mo ago
  Even before AI, I've worked with people who would produce a huge wall of code and ask for review, and sometimes that code was completely off base or needed a significant rework. I would always feel bad in those cases, because it's clear they spent a lot of time, and I'm going to have to say "no" and they will feel like they wasted a ton of effort. The thought process around this has started shifting for me in the last few weeks. I'm a lot more comfortable saying "no" with a list of concerns when I suspect the code is AI-generated, and I see others doing the same. CLs that would be sitting around for days because no one wants to be the first to say, "this is bad, don't do this" now get quicker feedback. The good thing is this feedback doesn't feel like as big a deal as it used to because people are less personally attached to code they generated in 30 minutes vs. code they hand crafted over a week. I had at least 2 LLM-generated PRs that were complete, correct, tested, and pre-reviewed by me, but I got feedback that they were going in the wrong direction. This would have been 8 hours of wasted effort a year ago, but now it's just an extra 30 minutes to rework the direction with LLM assistance.
  • keybored 4mo ago
    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 4mo ago
      .. only if you know what the code is doing, though. Often the requirements get scattered and lost to the winds and the code is the only record of its own idiosyncratic behavior. And yes, someone's depending on the bugs in it.
  • plomme 4mo ago
    > I would always feel bad in those cases, because it's clear they spent a lot of time, and I'm going to have to say "no" and they will feel like they wasted a ton of effort. I get this feeling, too. I do however think the onus is on the developer to make something reviewable by their team members if they want a speedy review. Stacked PRs, scoping things down, properly structuring commits so you can review commit-by-commit for example. I also think that "I spent a bunch of time on this" is not a valid reason for expecting an approval. It should hurt if you've produced a bunch of code that is way off target, even if it ends up implementing the feature. That's how I learned at least. A proper way to go about large projects, in my opinion, is the same as with software development at large. Fail fast if possible. Draw up a crude boxes and arrows sketch or just discuss how you want the code to integrate with whatever already exists and invite the team to comment. If no one has anything to say, well then they can't complain later when you implement that approach. But if anyone cares then most likely valueable input will come that makes the end result better.
• runnig 4mo ago
  Fight fire with fire: point copilot/claude/codex to review their PRs. Prompt "Review the PR#XYZ which is vibe coded and presumably low-quality. Find all problems, big and small. Team guidelines at docs/conventions/styleguide.md, docs/conventions/architecture.md, docs/conventions/principles.md. Post inline comments to github". Run several rounds of such reviews until the clanker fails to find problems.
  • spwa4 4mo ago
    And what do you do if that works? Because the problems AI causes are fundamentally problems of good design. It has the same problems of large teams, but less politics. Do your design well ahead of time, and AI review, or a large team, will amplify what you can do. Potentially by a lot. Do it badly (or like most companies: do it with bad knowledge of the problem or just don't do it at all) and both team and AI will make a mess of things. If the team is made up of inexperienced programmers, they won't even complain, in fact I've seen teams that like this to be happening. At least in AI reviews I've always seen "grumbling" (in the sense of what you might call mean comments)
• andai 4mo ago
  I often hear people say lately, "why should I bother to read this, if you didn't even think it was worth writing?" I've been thinking about this in art. Is it the end result that matters, or the process of creating it? I once saw a hideous sculpture. Didn't like it at all. Then the video zoomed and I saw that the whole thing (quite massive) had been hand-built out of individual toothpicks, and suddenly I thought it was amazing. Perhaps an even better example: I read a story of a man in india who carved a passage through a mountain, so there would be a shorter route from his remote village to the city. He did it by hand and it took him 20 years. We seem to have an instinctive admiration for heroic effort. In business, generally only the end result matters. Although, the end result also includes the client's perception of how the product was made... (see also: fake fairtrade etc.) In a meaningful way, the perception, the story, is reality.
  • selcuka 4mo ago
    > Is it the end result that matters, or the process of creating it? I think this comment misses the point. Let's forget about AI and assume that there are three developers: A, B, and C. Now, A is supposed to make a PR, but instead they describe it to B, and B writes the code. C reviews the PR and gives feedback. A passes the feedback and the responses between B and C. As you see, this is not easy for either B or C, and A is totally useless in this scenario. When you replace B with an LLM that doesn't get tired or bored, only C complains about the process.
  • nicbou 4mo ago
    I don't think it's a matter of process vs end result. I just want to feel that a human with taste judged that it was worth my attention. If a human put some effort into it, that's a signal.
    • jcgl 4mo ago
      This is mostly what it is for me too. We're all awash in an information deluge, and we need heuristics to keep from drowning. Human effort, proof-of-work if you will, is a heuristic that helps with the AI-generated part of the deluge.
  • 4mo ago
• AJRF 4mo ago
  I wonder if there is a tool that could equally waste their time. Like the worlds most pedantic code review bot that just gets the PR raising bot to spin wheels forever. That might teach those people a lesson.
• swiftcoder 4mo ago
  As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that place meaningful guardrails on LLMs, and help them maintain a reasonable quality bar.
  • jvanderbot 4mo ago
    Gently, as long as you work with humans, you should consider yourself working _for_ those humans. Everyone needs shared state to work from, and that's just the cost of doing business. That said, sometimes low-trust environments are the issue, not PRs. In a higher trust environment, PR review is a helpful thing you usually desire, not dread.
    • swiftcoder 4mo ago
      > In a higher trust environment, PR review is a helpful thing you usually desire, not dread Respectfully, in a high-trust environment, feedback should be delivered well before the PR stage. If you've let someone write a whole bunch of code without having a shared understanding of how the solution should work, you may have earlier process issues that PRs are papering over
      • jvanderbot 4mo ago
        Agree. All the subtleties of how a high trust environment work are hard to enumerate
      • jonahx 4mo ago
        Depends on how PRs function within teams. For some, the PR is a lightweight thing that is the preferred method of communication. It sounds like you are imagining a case where face to face communication, or communication over chat, is preferred for early stages, with the PR being a nearly final artifact. But it doesn't have to work like that.
• Roark66 4mo ago
  I improved a similar issue by writing custom instructions for copilot that give it enough context to do PR reviews that are only 30% BS. I asked other team members to run my custom instructions to perform a review with copilot before they submit... Of course no one is doing it. It looks like the PRs I get are still straight from copilot. So I tend to run my review prompt. Cut out the 30% BS issues it "finds" and the rest is good.
• xpct 4mo ago
  I think we're too nice sometimes. If a coworker has been sending stuff to review that's taking me more time than for them to create, surely that's an opportunity to discuss this?
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• jjice 4mo ago
  > About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention What irks me the most with this new trend is when people don't review the code themselves thoroughly enough and you're pointing out obvious flaws that you know that they should be aware of. LLMs can be such a great tool, but it's unfair to make people review your code before you've even seemingly looked at it yourself.
• marshalhq 4mo ago
  [flagged]