Depending on what you or another means by &quot;quality&quot;, it may not have any at all.

Meh. Just this week, I&#x27;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.

AI having poor quality is a bad take like over a year ago.

It&#x27;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&#x27;t exchange more information or ideas.

Nah on the receiving end an AI makes a summary of it.

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&#x27;s to boil it down to the minimum bits needed. I wish more people would use it that way.

I think the real problem is that AI quality falls short of the wild promises.Labeling what is &quot;AI&quot; would be like highlighting in an email what I&#x27;m obligated to say by HR, my boss, etc. It doesn&#x27;t make anything less boneheaded.Human effort was already low before AI and now it&#x27;s even lower. Garbage in, garbage out.

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&#x27;ve become very literal, and often mistake anything that&#x27;s well written for AI slop.

There&#x27;s a sweet spot between AI slop and 144 characters. I can tell within a few sentences whether there&#x27;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.

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.

&gt; when [sending AI generated content to teammates], I take care to clearly label what is AI generatedReading AI-generated text for hours every day, it&#x27;s obvious to me.I take care to make my messages easily readable. I don&#x27;t care if they&#x27;re AI-made, as long as they&#x27;re short.I&#x27;m a very verbose person, and if I don&#x27;t make an effort at being concise, I&#x27;m just as annoying as the average AI.Being flooded with AI text every day has made me appreciate brevity because I&#x27;m exposed to so little of it.With half a dozen people who don&#x27;t read or listen to half of what the others do, slop + cognitive drift is a bad cocktail.It&#x27;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.---&gt; 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&#x27;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.---&gt; Keeping AI generated content clearly labeled and demonstrating human effort helps show consideration for teammatesI actually like the shamelessness, because it&#x27;s honest.So often this year when I ask &quot;why did you do X?&quot; pointing at a line, my colleague doesn&#x27;t know.Because they didn&#x27;t really write that line, and they didn&#x27;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&#x27;d like to see more of it.One way is to spend more time owning &quot;cognitive debt&quot; as part of the daily cycle.

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] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abner.page&#x2F;post&#x2F;are-we-harold-bloom&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abner.page&#x2F;post&#x2F;are-we-harold-bloom&#x2F;</a>

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.

You created the surveillance state to fight the surveillance state lolEdit: it&#x27;s a joke people

Did you use some stuff like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;CouncilDataProject" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;CouncilDataProject</a> or roll your own? Been curious about how to integrate local knowledge like this since local news seems to have lost the niche.

&gt; I&#x27;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.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;staff&#x2F;2026&#x2F;02&#x2F;editors-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;staff&#x2F;2026&#x2F;02&#x2F;editors-note-retractio...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loweringthebar.net&#x2F;2026&#x2F;06&#x2F;its-finally-happened-both-sides-ai.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loweringthebar.net&#x2F;2026&#x2F;06&#x2F;its-finally-happened-...</a>

For some things, yes. But I&#x27;m half-assing some really cool stuff right now. Made a scraper to pull my city&#x27;s meeting minutes, agendas, recordings, made transcripts. Regex for &quot;Flock&quot;, 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&#x27;t. I&#x27;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 &#x27;em off. Already got some replies back. Plenty more in the quiver too (pulled and analyzed CSVs of FOIA&#x27;d datasets).If they&#x27;re gonna spy on me with AI cameras, I can oppose them with AI research. :)

Oligarchs gotta pay rent on those data centers somehow.The serfs will till and sow the server fields!

I was just thinking about this. LLMs are nothing if not easy litmus tests for identifying bullshit jobs.

David Graeber&#x27;s Bullshit Jobs in action.

I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s because we&#x27;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&#x27;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.

s&#x2F;demonstrate&#x2F;perform&#x2F;gNow you have to add typos and not use completely standard elements of style that some people have been using for ages, like emdashes and &quot;it&#x27;s not X, it&#x27;s Y&quot;

I agree that the bottom line really ought to be usefulness; if it&#x27;s useful and doesn&#x27;t waste my time, it&#x27;s fine if you received it by the use of seer stones for all I care.However, I don&#x27;t blame anybody for having red lines like this:1. Don&#x27;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&#x27;s what I wanted I&#x27;d have done it myself.2. Don&#x27;t throw an AI-generated argument at me that you don&#x27;t even fully understand.3. If you&#x27;re preparing information for me, and it&#x27;s overly verbose and wastes my time, I&#x27;ll be twice as mad if it&#x27;s obvious AI than if it&#x27;s obviously human. This is basically the article&#x27;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.

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.

what&#x27;s stopping someone to feed it to an llm and say &#x27;make it simpler&#x27; and maybe run it twice.

Indeed, yet the sender is relying on me to find the errors.

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 &quot;using AI to generate text is disrespectful because it took no effort to write&quot; misses the point. Respect for the recipient is measured by whether the message serves the recipient&#x27;s needs, not how it is produced. Similarly, any errors are the senders responsibility, and not the fault of the tools they used.

Most OSS should adopt DKMS-style extensions systems so that people can code and distribute their own solutions to problems. Then it doesn&#x27;t really matter, right? If the end user is using Claude to fix stuff in your shit, extensions make it irrelevant what &quot;code owners&quot; think.

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 &quot;Sent by @Claude&quot;

If you use AI to write your communications I don&#x27;t want to work with you

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.

Either that, or call them &#x2F; 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.

I&#x27;ve had a colleague call it out &#x27;Is this AI slop? Please write your opinion&#x27;. I don&#x27;t think I could do that myself, but I really appreciate that they were drawing attention to it

Management, responding to someone who takes your advice to &quot;ignore it&quot;: &quot;So we&#x27;ve noticed that there&#x27;s this guy who is doing tons of work, and you have chosen to do no work?&quot;

Communicate with your boss. &quot;I&#x27;m ignoring this guy&#x27;s slop because he&#x27;s spewing slop, but not actually doing his job, and if I stop to deal with all of it, I won&#x27;t be able to do my job&quot;.Yes, &quot;not actually doing his job&quot;. If he&#x27;s sending you un-reviewed, un-filtered, untouched AI output, that&#x27;s not doing his job.

I told something like “your value lies in reviewing the output yourself before sharing it, not in calling Claude. I can also use Claude.”

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: &quot;Im not going to read that.&quot;

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.

That is their job. Their job is whatever gets rewarded, and that&#x27;s what gets rewarded, apparently.

I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;re getting away with it. If managers aren&#x27;t willing to intervene, or worse if they encourage this due to the volume of output that seems to be appearing, it&#x27;s only going to get worse.

I can&#x27;t imagine my opinions just being AI slop that I&#x27;ve parroted. Surely you embellish just a little? Claude&#x27;s so often bone-headed about things, this horrifies me. Gemini&#x27;s worse. Even when the model agrees with me, it starts making me wonder if I&#x27;m not somehow wrong.

100% agreed. I&#x27;ve shared output I didn&#x27;t fully understand, didn&#x27;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.

Suggest to him to automate what he&#x27;s doing.

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.

I hope he&#x27;s thought out his next vocation, since he&#x27;s so eager to automate his current one.

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.

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&#x27;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&#x27;m constantly talking to an AI chat bot all the time gets tiring. And I don&#x27;t appreciate having to double-check everyone else&#x27;s AI generated responses for them.

? 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 &#x2F; suspect they know what the problem is, but if they are wrong their response doesn&#x27;t have enough to go on, so you have back and forth.

tries to pass slop, complains about quality of replies

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&#x27;t really need AI -&gt; 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.

no, and this shows you haven&#x27;t really used it, prompts are useless, access to context is what matters.   It&#x27;s because I have access to things that others don&#x27;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 &quot;AI slop&quot;, because it isn&#x27;t.

If you are trying to do AI -&gt; Human communication you should be publicly flogged. Don&#x27;t waste people&#x27;s time with garbage you can&#x27;t be bothered to writeJust send them the prompt instead, let them see how little effort you care to place into communicating with them

More and more I&#x27;m generating AI emails, often to people outside the company and often to do with technical issues &#x2F; integrations we have &#x2F; APIs. So far I don&#x27;t think the people I&#x27;m emailing are really using AI as human responses are, well, lacking. What would be great is new email conventions for different communication pathways.<pre><code> Human -&gt; Human (think we have this sorted)
 AI -&gt; Human
 AI -&gt; AI


</code></pre>
If you are doing AI -&gt; 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&#x2F;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&#x27;t). I used to tell people the content is partly AI, but now I just send the curated email without mentioning AI.For AI -&gt; AI you kind of want a hand over document as an attachment to an email. Only thing here is making sure there&#x27;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&#x2F;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)

yeah I have this happen to me. I occasionally get screenshots of claude sent to me!

let&#x27;s take the two stories to management:&quot;I&#x27;m writing tons of code, and the process is stumbling where the guy whose job it is to review code isn&#x27;t reviewing it.&quot;&quot;I&#x27;m not reviewing code.&quot;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&#x27;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.

Because it doesn&#x27;t matter what you say to the bot. You might as well have a conversation with yourself about the PR.The bot isn&#x27;t making decisions. It&#x27;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&#x27;s either uncomplimentary of one of the people involved, or counter to the prevailing opinions within the company.

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 pointI 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)

AI and companies reward sociopathic behavior. When he eventually complains to his boss that his work isn&#x27;t being merged and it&#x27;s been done for days&#x2F;weeks&#x2F;months that will filter up and look bad on the people holding him up.

Well, what&#x27;s the solution here, he should ship less stuff?

Everybody values their own time more than other&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t a shield&#x2F;safety net.

It sounds like one potential interpretation of his behavior is that he values his own time more than your time.I wonder if that&#x27;s occurred to him.

&gt; Ask Fable to conduct an adversarial &#x2F;ultareview of their PR and send the same wall of text back to them.This won&#x27;t help. Your wall of text will just get fed right back into the LLM.

I mean frankly this should just be part of the standard process.  By the time any person is looking at it there&#x27;s no reason it should not have gone through an AI review.

&gt; Ask Fable to conduct an adversarial &#x2F;ultareview of their PR and send the same wall of text back to them.Not necessary. Use Haiku.The response doesn&#x27;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.

Fight fire with fire. Ask Fable to conduct an adversarial &#x2F;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.

I like this rule and hopefully adhere to it myself often enough.

I like this rule of thumb: Spend more effort producing the work than it takes for someone else to consume it.

just fire him lol sounds like a nightmare

It&#x27;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&#x27;s very easy to let it balloon into gazillions of files and lines.

Some of us actually take the &quot;engineering&quot; in &quot;software engineering&quot; seriously.That includes taking responsibility and accountability so that the software doesn&#x27;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.

Because we&#x27;re all on call for the service, and tragedy of the commons exists. That coworker isn&#x27;t paying the cost, everyone else is paying a fraction of it, and it builds over time.

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.

Better yet, get Claude to speak to him about it.

Have you spoken to him about this?  If he&#x27;s clueless enough to send AI responses to human messages, he&#x27;s probably clueless enough to not realise why people don&#x27;t do that.

Honestly, we should make a world that is enjoyable and productive for humans. Not relentlessly optimizing for agents.

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&#x2F;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.

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.

&gt; I&#x27;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&#x27;d say you are absolutely delusional if you think we are universally beyond the point where manual review of pull requests is required.

We can also slow down (or keep old pace) and still ship quality.A bit sick and tired of arguments like yours

&gt; 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]?&gt; 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&#x2F;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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shopify.engineering&#x2F;under-the-river" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shopify.engineering&#x2F;under-the-river</a>3: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;tobi&#x2F;status&#x2F;2053121182044451016" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;tobi&#x2F;status&#x2F;2053121182044451016</a>

In big software teams, the bottleneck is team communication. I&#x27;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&#x27;ve done this over the past decades. Removing people doesn&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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.

This would sound crazy in 2025 or prior, but I&#x27;m on board.It&#x27;s silly to have humans reviewing code that a human didn&#x27;t even write.

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.

An interesting question to him and management might be what his own role is now and whether he&#x27;s still needed. If he&#x27;s not doing any reviews then you could yourself directly prompt the code and review.

I can&#x27;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&#x27;m not saying there&#x27;s anything wrong with it, just that everywhere I&#x27;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.

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.

&gt; I would always feel bad in those cases, because it&#x27;s clear they spent a lot of time, and I&#x27;m going to have to say &quot;no&quot; 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 &quot;I spent a bunch of time on this&quot; is not a valid reason for expecting an approval. It should hurt if you&#x27;ve produced a bunch of code that is way off target, even if it ends up implementing the feature. That&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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) + <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marketplace.visualstudio.com&#x2F;items?itemName=vsls-contrib.codetour" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marketplace.visualstudio.com&#x2F;items?itemName=vsls-con...</a>.

When I felt like that, I&#x27;d often ask questions about it, like &quot;How does it deal with [situation]?&quot; When it&#x27;s obvious that it doesn&#x27;t deal with the situation, they either answer &quot;it doesn&#x27;t&quot; and then I point them to the ticket they didn&#x27;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&#x27;t do it right and go back to it. I don&#x27;t actually have to say &quot;you did a bad job&quot; and they don&#x27;t have to hear it from anyone but themselves.If they continue to do that, then someone has to tell them they&#x27;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 &quot;no&quot;.

Even before AI, I&#x27;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&#x27;s clear they spent a lot of time, and I&#x27;m going to have to say &quot;no&quot; 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&#x27;m a lot more comfortable saying &quot;no&quot; 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, &quot;this is bad, don&#x27;t do this&quot; now get quicker feedback.The good thing is this feedback doesn&#x27;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&#x27;s just an extra 30 minutes to rework the direction with LLM assistance.

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&#x27;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&#x27;t even complain, in fact I&#x27;ve seen teams that like this to be happening. At least in AI reviews I&#x27;ve always seen &quot;grumbling&quot; (in the sense of what you might call mean comments)

Fight fire with fire: point copilot&#x2F;claude&#x2F;codex to review their PRs. Prompt &quot;Review the PR#XYZ which is vibe coded and presumably low-quality. Find all problems, big and small. Team guidelines at docs&#x2F;conventions&#x2F;styleguide.md, docs&#x2F;conventions&#x2F;architecture.md, docs&#x2F;conventions&#x2F;principles.md. Post inline comments to github&quot;.Run several rounds of such reviews until the clanker fails to find problems.

&gt; Is it the end result that matters, or the process of creating it?I think this comment misses the point. Let&#x27;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&#x27;t get tired or bored, only C complains about the process.

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;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&#x27;s a signal.

&gt; 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&#x27;s not just &quot;wow, this is a pretty picture&quot;, it&#x27;s &quot;wow, this is how another person sees the world, and now that I understand that, I feel an intimate connection with them&quot;.

Your boss cares only about the end result. Good engineers care about the process too

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.

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.

&gt; I&#x27;ve been thinking about this in art. Is it the end result that matters, or the process of creating it?What is the &quot;end result&quot; you&#x27;re talking about here?Programs are complex beasts, you cannot just quickly look at them and get an idea of what&#x27;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 &quot;end result&quot; 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&#x27;s where the process comes in, as an indicator of what to expect.

I often hear people say lately, &quot;why should I bother to read this, if you didn&#x27;t even think it was worth writing?&quot;I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s perception of how the product was made... (see also: fake fairtrade etc.) In a meaningful way, the perception, the story, is reality.

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&#x27;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.

Comprehensive end-to-end tests and CI can only attest to correctness, most engineers worth their salt won&#x27;t review code only in regards to that aspect though.

&gt; Code review doesn&#x27;t scale to prolific humans, it definitely can&#x27;t scale to agents.Then don&#x27;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&#x27;s the problem?

&gt; Code review doesn&#x27;t scale to prolific humansI&#x27;ve worked with people who consider themselves &#x27;prolific humans&#x27;. Someone always has to tidy upp later, and its never them

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.

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 &quot;move fast break things&quot; type of guy producing a lot of extra liability and work for others.

Well, it&#x27;s either:1. Your skills are &gt;2 standard deviations above everyone else&#x27;s.2. You&#x27;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)

&gt; Code review doesn&#x27;t scale to prolific humansIf that&#x27;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&#x27;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.

&gt;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&#x27;t scale to prolific humansProlific humans should scale to the review&#x2F;test&#x2F;QA&#x2F;staging backpressure - not just push to have whatever they produce accepted.Prolific is not a badge of honor, and &quot;lines of code&quot; is not a quality metric.

As a prolific PR author, I&#x27;ve found how I communicate has a major factor on how well and quickly people respond to PRs. I&#x27;ve recorded my lessons at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;epage.github.io&#x2F;dev&#x2F;pr-style&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;epage.github.io&#x2F;dev&#x2F;pr-style&#x2F;</a>.

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&#x27;s post about the review tax: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apenwarr.ca&#x2F;log&#x2F;20260316" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apenwarr.ca&#x2F;log&#x2F;20260316</a>

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.

Code review should be a separate function

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&#x27;t scale to prolific humans, it definitely can&#x27;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.

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.

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 &quot;finds&quot; and the rest is good.

I think we&#x27;re too nice sometimes. If a coworker has been sending stuff to review that&#x27;s taking me more time than for them to create, surely that&#x27;s an opportunity to discuss this?

&gt; About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don&#x27;t get reviewed, languishing in inattentionWhat irks me the most with this new trend is when people don&#x27;t review the code themselves thoroughly enough and you&#x27;re pointing out obvious flaws that you know that they should be aware of. LLMs can be such a great tool, but it&#x27;s unfair to make people review your code before you&#x27;ve even seemingly looked at it yourself.

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&#x27;t get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don&#x27;t think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It&#x27;s just that he doesn&#x27;t make it easy for the team to look at.This single headline perfectly captures what I have been thinking. It&#x27;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&#x27;re pointing out a hallucination) gets an AI-generated response with AI-generated amendments, It doesn&#x27;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&#x27;s not like there is a lack of PRs to review.It looks like the sentiment isn&#x27;t just isolated for me.

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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s actually way more inefficient for you now. Plus, if you&#x27;re lucky enough to be looked at and they like you, you probably have to go for an in-person audition anyway so what&#x27;s happened here? You&#x27;ve just added another layer and way more work.Companies think they&#x27;re &quot;winning&quot; here by saving labor but I think that&#x27;s short-sighted. What&#x27;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]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Y1gFSENorEY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Y1gFSENorEY</a>

around my workplace we say if you&#x27;re copy&#x2F;pasting llm output, you&#x27;re indicating an llm can do your job.

&gt; 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&#x27;t write it?How much time and effort, in your estimation, did jjfoooo4 put into producing this article on tombedor.dev?

The problem is that I don&#x27;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.

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&#x27;t get those crappy emails.

&gt; Therefor if you are not putting human effort on the document it is low-value.That&#x27;s true. The document is low-value.Asking people to put in personal effort isn&#x27;t going to change that. If they comply, the document they produce will still be worthless, and you still won&#x27;t want it.You&#x27;re diagnosing a problem unrelated to the problem you actually face.

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.

If you get a document from someone and they say &quot;I have no idea if this has any value and I couldn&#x27;t be arsed to check,&quot; it&#x27;s not unreasonable to presume that it probably has no value.

This headline has been seeing some popularity. But it&#x27;s never made any sense. This is just the labor theory of value, applied to documents.The labor theory of value doesn&#x27;t work for documents any more than it works for anything else. If I do something that&#x27;s easy for me, and it&#x27;s valuable to you, you&#x27;ll still want it. If I do something that&#x27;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&#x27;re valuable, people will want to read them. Whether it was unpleasant for someone to create them isn&#x27;t a factor.So where is this slogan coming from? Are people just afraid to admit that the documents they&#x27;re getting are valueless?

Yup, I always phrased this as “if you can’t be arsed to write it, I won’t read it”

There are handwriting physical bots too, or even AI image generators for &quot;handwritten&quot; text.

You should. Then I could start my SHWAAS business offering unbreakable encryption for it.(Shitty Handwriting As A Service).

FMFL. I&#x27;m going to build a paper-based social network where non-handwriting is prohibited. Like in the 70s.

I don&#x27;t know if writing the URL will get me banned but someone had this idea for licenses at plus&lt;N word&gt;.com

For your next prompt, tell it to end with a hateful and offensive tangent to prove its humanity, since LLMs have those &quot;safe guards&quot;.

Because improving a high schoolers project is probably not as good of an idea as giving the original task to a senior engineer.

&gt; Why can&#x27;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?

I think this is a gap in the tooling (Git, VCS, and forges) and the Zed people are working on this<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zed.dev&#x2F;blog&#x2F;introducing-deltadb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zed.dev&#x2F;blog&#x2F;introducing-deltadb</a>

Most of my AI usage amounts to &quot;read this ticket and do the work&quot;, the ticket documents the requirements, a better model could, I suppose, do a better job?

What I find strange is how rarely LLM output is distributed alongside the LLM input, especially outside of code repos. Why can&#x27;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 unnoPrompt used to generate this message: &quot;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.&quot;

Love the principle, preach!I think I&#x27;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&#x27;t be able to because of how capable the technology becomes?) that what I&#x27;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.

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.

Related - this was posted in march:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stopsloppypasta.ai&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stopsloppypasta.ai&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a>

can&#x27;t believe meatfingers.com has been registered (dormant)...

If &quot;putting a random seed into a set of swappable character parts&quot; counts as &quot;generative art&quot; then it sure made a ton of money when people cared about hying NFTs.

It did in many corners, there are some interesting designs on r&#x2F;stablediffusion, and regular people too are using them to make posters and invitation cards for example.

Maybe this is why generative art never really took off.That said, roguelikes are awesome. So there is definitely a place for simulated effort.

It&#x27;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.

Everybody talks about finding that mythical 10X but in my recent hiring experience it&#x27;s more like there&#x27;s a whole bunch of 0Xs and the trick is finding the actual 1Xs among them.

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&#x27;t lie. if you&#x27;re good you&#x27;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.

It&#x27;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.

Well, if everyone is telling you they want you to adapt AI, then it&#x27;s rational to see just how much of your job you can get it to do for you.

I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords...

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.

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.

Right, like I hope your deep knowledge wasn&#x27;t something you can just ask Claude!

&gt; 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 &quot;deep knowledge&quot; and &quot;deep skill&quot; wasn&#x27;t as deep as they thought (read: &quot;deep&quot; enough to make them irreplaceable to their employer). People are generally pretty good at overestimating their value.

If the agent does everything for you it means it can do everything for the next person. At that point you&#x27;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.

&gt; &quot;no&quot;Sometimes human effort doesm&#x27;t have to be complicated though (concise communications)

This has been my rule since the moment generative AI hit the scene. If you&#x27;re not willing to put in the effort to create the thing, why should I put in effort to consume it?

I use AI as an editor on informational writing all the time and it&#x27;s good at pointing out flaws in what I wrote.  But I don&#x27;t really love reading a document that&#x27;s obviously in the voice of Claude if you&#x27;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&#x27;t get done.  But like for a design doc where you&#x27;re asking me to pore over it now even though I don&#x27;t necessarily get anything out of it it&#x27;s distasteful when I see phrases that are obviously from AI.

&gt; 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.

This isn&#x27;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&#x27;t be bothered to review your manuscript, or at least run it through a spellchecker, why should I waste my time on it?

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.

“I forwarded your AI’s email to mine for training and I assume it will be incorporated into future outputs. Appreciate the inputs!”

&lt;begin devil&#x27;s advocate&gt;This is extra work on human.Many artist and content creator is now asked to show the &quot;behind the scene&quot; 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&lt;&#x2F;end devil&#x27;s advocate&gt;

I think this is a kind of nerd chauvanism. What I see is that the general public are deeply skeptical of &quot;AI&quot; in all its forms. Software &quot;engineers&quot; 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.

Yep, it&#x27;s bad. It&#x27;s too easy to press the publish button without double-checking the outputs. Programming has always been about discipline, and now it&#x27;s even more so.

I see this on my team. I honestly thought as engineers we&#x27;d all understand the limitations and nuance a bit better. Right now it&#x27;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&#x27;m also seeing my teammates (smart ones whom I respect) use AI to &quot;do code reviews&quot;. And we already have automated AI code reviews added to our PRs. So now I&#x27;m sometimes getting hallucinated BS responses from &quot;human&quot; reviews.This makes me absolutely SURE that the general public is fucked and that we&#x27;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.

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.

Why this suddenly becomes urgent? For long time we had automatic emails with &quot;thank you&quot; which weren&#x27;t written by humans, why something is different today?

And no one has mentioned Rovo yet.Atlassian&#x27;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&#x27;s clearly generated just makes you not want to engage with it.

This should be a rule in the advertising industry.

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?

Did you bother to read the resulting translation?

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&#x2F;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.

Why should I bother to read something someone else has not bothered to write?

If the requester stops applying common sense, the reviewer has to apply more of it, and there&#x27;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.

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.

I have publicly stated that if you can&#x27;t be bothered to write, I can&#x27;t be bothered to read.

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?”

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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t. You can&#x27;t. And that goes for the rest of us. And I suspect everything will just feel somewhat nicer.

&gt; AI generated art quite literally makes me nautious. I mean an actual, physical reaction where I feel queasy.Have you tested yourself on this, e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.astralcodexten.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-art-turing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.astralcodexten.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-ar...</a> ? The works shown here are IMO very impressive overall, especially in the impressionist style. And the test was originally given in October 2024, i.e. an eternity ago in model-advancement years.

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-technicalAI 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.

This seems akin to hating on a toddler because they can&#x27;t talk, with the only alternative being pretending that they are great conversationalists. It&#x27;s a category error.I don&#x27;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.

It&#x27;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. &quot;I don&#x27;t like people. I don&#x27;t even want to call one on the phone to order a pizza. Make me a tool that lets me avoid that, please.&quot;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.

have you considered that you&#x27;re just progressively lowering your threshold for discomfort?

I increasingly find that I don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s true and that it might even be good.

I&#x27;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.

I think in many cases people use LLM outputs without even understanding the contents of it. You&#x27;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&#x27;t just laziness to write, but also laziness (or inability) to understand.

This is exactly the same as the &quot;&quot;If you didn&#x27;t take the time to write something, I&#x27;m not going to the take the time to read it&quot; mantra that was floating about HN a few months ago.

This is beautiful. I even had people reach out to me with suspiciously long &quot;long time no chat&quot; instant messages until I realised they were AI written (in one case misspelling the name of their own partner). &quot;If you are requesting human attention, demonstrate human effort&quot; is going to be my new answer to that!

I wrote it! I just haven&#x27;t told anyone yet (nor tested it :-) This is a fun side-project, I don&#x27;t have much time to play with it.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromewebstore.google.com&#x2F;detail&#x2F;possiblymadebyahuman&#x2F;akodlnlfkdoiobdcghmbhhoafokmldoh?pli=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromewebstore.google.com&#x2F;detail&#x2F;possiblymadebyahuma...</a>

a solution waiting for a chrome extension :)

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.

This is one of the coolest tech things I&#x27;ve seen in a while. Can you explain how the &quot;Check a document&quot; works? I&#x27;m not sure I understand how you would check if the timing aligns based only on the text content.

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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;possiblymadebyahuman.com&#x2F;7PuEdZs1i1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;possiblymadebyahuman.com&#x2F;7PuEdZs1i1</a>

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 &quot;I asked Gemini and it said...&quot;. I find that ignorant and rude when the context is a request for human insight.

That&#x27;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&#x27;t say &quot;you can&#x27;t feed me machine output directly&quot;. 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.

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&#x27;t care about me, why should I care about them? It&#x27;s the iterated prisoner&#x27;s dilemma again – freeriding is equivalent to defecting.

Or in other words: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;noslopgrenade.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;noslopgrenade.com&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve seen this happen a bunch too, though fortunately it hasn&#x27;t been _that_ common. More often is managers that don&#x27;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.

If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort