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't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at.
This single headline perfectly captures what I have been thinking. It'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're pointing out a hallucination) gets an AI-generated response with AI-generated amendments, It doesn'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's not like there is a lack of PRs to review.
It looks like the sentiment isn't just isolated for me.
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.
This is the point where you decide. It used to be low stakes and easy to care about the job you did for other people.
Do you want to put the same effort into your job when nobody else does, or should you reserve your thoughts and just feed it back into the LLM?
The LLMs are being advertised as output increasers but companies so far are using them as excuses to fire people instead of creating previously unbelievable things. It might be better to feed your coworkers output back in and use your thoughts to start the company you thought you never had time for.
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.
You are thinking of "game theory" and it's what happens when your coworkers don't give a shit. And all it takes is one, both because they can degrade product quality faster than you can gate it or fix it and because the performance assessment techniques are about 3 years behind the state of LLMs and if they play, you have to also or you'll get shit on from such a height you won't even know what hit you.
And once you start playing the game, then one day - it doesn't take long - you wake up and ask yourself if this is how you want to spend 8 hours of your life monday through friday. I think a lot of us are saying no but now need to figure out where our money is going to come from. I don't have the answers.
“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.
What I don’t understand is what value is the person adding to this equation? Put another way, what’s the difference between them feeding the wall of text to the LLM, and you feeding the wall of text to the LLM, bypassing them in the process entirely?
The role of the person in the equation is to take personal responsibility for the proposed change and review the changes prior to PR submission. You can't put AI on a PIP. It's acceptable to use AI as a coding assistant in 2026, but if a human is not reviewing what they submit and taking responsibility, their value is on par with a ChatGPT subscription.
> Ask Fable to conduct an adversarial /ultareview of their PR and send the same wall of text back to them.
Not necessary. Use Haiku.
The response doesn'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.
I mean frankly this should just be part of the standard process. By the time any person is looking at it there's no reason it should not have gone through an AI review.
The solution is that he spends more time scoping the size of the PR so that it’s reviewable and understands the code he’s submitting well enough to have discussions about it. And that he does so human to human so that they can come to mutual understanding.
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.
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.
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)
"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.
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?
The person who "writes" code is also supposed to review their own work, and answer for that. If they won't do that - well - they should be fired. But if you have weak or uninvolved leadership, then the team's only rational recourse is to shun them.
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'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'm constantly talking to an AI chat bot all the time gets tiring. And I don't appreciate having to double-check everyone else's AI generated responses for them.
Either that, or call them / 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.
Sure, some people have no self awareness. In that case you can change your approach, if you are a manager or otherwise invested in the company you can put pressure on them to increase the quality of their work and to own the things they submit. Bring up specific examples of poor quality work, errors in documents/messages, etc.
Or if you don't care you can just ignore this persons messages.
I had someone submit a PR that was 3000 lines of shell scripts. Totally useless crap. I tried repeatedly asking him why he made particular choices and it was so painfully obvious that he had absolutely no idea and was just inventing bullshit answers. I would rather he have just said "I don't know, Claude added that", then tell obvious lies to my face.
This feels like a BOFH response but I'm strangely not opposed to it; If you generate something, you should own it ... regardless of what tool you used to generate it.
I've had a colleague call it out 'Is this AI slop? Please write your opinion'. I don'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 "ignore it": "So we've noticed that there's this guy who is doing tons of work, and you have chosen to do no work?"
Communicate with your boss. "I'm ignoring this guy's slop because he's spewing slop, but not actually doing his job, and if I stop to deal with all of it, I won't be able to do my job".
Yes, "not actually doing his job". If he's sending you un-reviewed, un-filtered, untouched AI output, that's not doing his job.
I'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'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'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're getting away with it. If managers aren't willing to intervene, or worse if they encourage this due to the volume of output that seems to be appearing, it's only going to get worse.
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.
I think everyone should be looking to balance their work effort against the payout of the job. They should also be changing jobs when the effort to reward ratio starts to become unfavorable compared to other jobs on the market.
The problem with the personality above is that the person isn't playing like a team (like you said) but as an individual maximizing their own visibility while loading their coworkers up with the review effort. They found an asymmetry to abuse (they generate text easily, coworkers get a lot of extra work to review it). They don't care what it costs their coworkers. They just like that it makes them look good.
This isn'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't be bothered to review your manuscript, or at least run it through a spellchecker, why should I waste my time on it?
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.
It'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.
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't lie. if you're good you'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'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.
yeah but these days it is even more important to filter out bads
and even at "good" companies you have people who can game the system to get in, and then they struggle to get anything done on time or be responsible for taking on and completing any initiatives bigger than a single task on a bigger scope.
Indeed. You really need to find people who don't want to play politics and instead get stuff done. I'm still not sure how to hire for these sorts of people in the age of AI, where people even cheat in interviews. Maybe probation programs? Have multiple people work for a month or two and cut those who don't succeed.
this is what I've been doing, and obviously I have a startup so I need to double-ensure that I don't onboard any bads. you can start people off as contractors too.
I still think a single in person LC style (doesn't have to be LC per se, could be domain specific) logical thinking/reasoning exercise is useful. I want to ensure the person can actually put 2 and 2 together and think. This is just a fast filter.
If they seem like they can think, then I like to do 2-3 systems design interviews. I'll try to give them something related to things I like, such as graph structures, writing a complex query that needs to be dynamically generated, or something related to infrastructure or how they'd do something that I've already done. After all, this is MY project they're joining.
So far that has worked well.
Few more things -
I like to test if they are a humble type (they can work on a team putting ego on the side - the mission is our number 1 priority). if they say they know something that i know and asked, then they can be sure I'm going to drill them on it. if it turns out they lied, i'm not wasting more time. Thanks for your time, take care. This is very important to me. Just say you don't know, it isn't a big deal because ever since like 1994 that has not been an issue. You can just learn things online, and AI makes that even faster. I am never afraid to say I don't know something, and I've asked plenty of "dumb" questions (while doing some due diligence first) so I don't really mind.
Can they handle information overload? I am the type of person who has multiple branches in my head of actions I can take next, so while I may appear stressed I'm really not. Can they keep up? Our goal as software engineers should be to come up with solutions that solve the problem in a way that makes building on it simpler in the future. My goal is simplicity and effectiveness. So I'll see if they can keep up, and eventually reduce the work to be done into atomic pieces. This is a fun exercise because it is collaborative and we get to bounce ideas fast back and forth.
Finally, I like to let them use their favorite tools, including AI tools (codex, claude, some ppl have esoteric custom stuff which is cool), to solve a problem together. It might be code related, it might not. Really depends on my mood. I like to see how they work and what sort of output they can come up with. This filters out people who only ask AI stuff, instead of having some framework they've already developed to be effective.
Honestly I don't know how to scale this process. I'm not really going to feel bad either about firing fast, ultimately this is a business and I don't want customers to suffer because we have some issues internally.
At the same time, I wonder if I even need to build out an org with 100s of people. That was an inefficiency (look at all the layoffs), and it is traumatic.
If I can find a few great people who can be supercharged and turbocharged and electrified with AI, then they can take on & own bigger responsibilities. My number 1 goal is to ensure they're with me on the mission, and after that all things seem to sort of fit into place.
What I find strange is how rarely LLM output is distributed alongside the LLM input, especially outside of code repos. Why can'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 unno
Prompt used to generate this message: "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."
I'd say it's because we'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'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.
For some things, yes. But I'm half-assing some really cool stuff right now. Made a scraper to pull my city's meeting minutes, agendas, recordings, made transcripts. Regex for "Flock", 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't. I'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 'em off. Already got some replies back. Plenty more in the quiver too (pulled and analyzed CSVs of FOIA'd datasets).
If they're gonna spy on me with AI cameras, I can oppose them with AI research. :)
Did you use some stuff like https://github.com/CouncilDataProject or roll your own? Been curious about how to integrate local knowledge like this since local news seems to have lost the niche.
I rolled my own. I hadn’t heard of this one, but I looked into stuff like OpenStates (now privately for-profit owned, ugh). My city just uses a Wordpress site so it’s structured enough. I’m looking at building something to ingest cities with Granicus and one other big local government meeting recorder via API whose name I forget. That should get decent coverage. There’s no way to catch the long tail of every local government’s recording process. Some cities people will just have to do manually. But it’s easy enough with LLM help.
Nope, I used a minute fraction of the technology they have, along with open records as is my right in this country, to stand up for my Fourth Amendment right to travel without creeps stalking my every move. I need to make my specific framework a bit more generic and then I'll put it here on HN. Or just offer a platform where people can bring an OR key and it can run on their city.
Citizens monitoring their government is literally THE foundation of democracy (ok, maybe voting comes before it, but then you have to monitor who you voted for to see if they’re doing what you voted for).
If the agent does everything for you it means it can do everything for the next person. At that point you'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.
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 think I'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't be able to because of how capable the technology becomes?) that what I'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.
I use AI as an editor on informational writing all the time and it's good at pointing out flaws in what I wrote. But I don't really love reading a document that's obviously in the voice of Claude if you'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't get done. But like for a design doc where you're asking me to pore over it now even though I don't necessarily get anything out of it it's distasteful when I see phrases that are obviously from AI.
More and more I'm generating AI emails, often to people outside the company and often to do with technical issues / integrations we have / APIs. So far I don't think the people I'm emailing are really using AI as human responses are, well, lacking. What would be great is new email conventions for different communication pathways.
Human -> Human (think we have this sorted)
AI -> Human
AI -> AI
If you are doing AI -> 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/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't). I used to tell people the content is partly AI, but now I just send the curated email without mentioning AI.
For AI -> AI you kind of want a hand over document as an attachment to an email. Only thing here is making sure there'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/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)
? 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 / suspect they know what the problem is, but if they are wrong their response doesn't have enough to go on, so you have back and forth.
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.
> 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 has been my rule since the moment generative AI hit the scene. If you're not willing to put in the effort to create the thing, why should I put in effort to consume it?
It did in many corners, there are some interesting designs on r/stablediffusion, and regular people too are using them to make posters and invitation cards for example.
If "putting a random seed into a set of swappable character parts" counts as "generative art" then it sure made a ton of money when people cared about hying NFTs.
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's to boil it down to the minimum bits needed. I wish more people would use it that way.
It'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't exchange more information or ideas.
Meh. Just this week, I'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.
Now you have to add typos and not use completely standard elements of style that some people have been using for ages, like emdashes and "it's not X, it's Y"
This headline has been seeing some popularity. But it's never made any sense. This is just the labor theory of value, applied to documents.
The labor theory of value doesn't work for documents any more than it works for anything else. If I do something that's easy for me, and it's valuable to you, you'll still want it. If I do something that'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're valuable, people will want to read them. Whether it was unpleasant for someone to create them isn't a factor.
So where is this slogan coming from? Are people just afraid to admit that the documents they're getting are valueless?
The problem is that I don'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.
Most OSS should adopt DKMS-style extensions systems so that people can code and distribute their own solutions to problems. Then it doesn't really matter, right? If the end user is using Claude to fix stuff in your shit, extensions make it irrelevant what "code owners" think.
> when [sending AI generated content to teammates], I take care to clearly label what is AI generated
Reading AI-generated text for hours every day, it's obvious to me.
I take care to make my messages easily readable. I don't care if they're AI-made, as long as they're short.
I'm a very verbose person, and if I don't make an effort at being concise, I'm just as annoying as the average AI.
Being flooded with AI text every day has made me appreciate brevity because I'm exposed to so little of it.
With half a dozen people who don't read or listen to half of what the others do, slop + cognitive drift is a bad cocktail.
It'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.
---
> 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'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.
---
> Keeping AI generated content clearly labeled and demonstrating human effort helps show consideration for teammates
I actually like the shamelessness, because it's honest.
So often this year when I ask "why did you do X?" pointing at a line, my colleague doesn't know.
Because they didn't really write that line, and they didn'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'd like to see more of it.
One way is to spend more time owning "cognitive debt" as part of the daily cycle.
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.
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've become very literal, and often mistake anything that's well written for AI slop.
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.
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'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'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'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'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's actually way more inefficient for you now. Plus, if you're lucky enough to be looked at and they like you, you probably have to go for an in-person audition anyway so what's happened here? You've just added another layer and way more work.
Companies think they're "winning" here by saving labor but I think that's short-sighted. What'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.
I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
The argument that "using AI to generate text is disrespectful because it took no effort to write" misses the point. Respect for the recipient is measured by whether the message serves the recipient's needs, not how it is produced. Similarly, any errors are the senders responsibility, and not the fault of the tools they used.
I agree that the bottom line really ought to be usefulness; if it's useful and doesn't waste my time, it's fine if you received it by the use of seer stones for all I care.
However, I don't blame anybody for having red lines like this:
1. Don'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's what I wanted I'd have done it myself.
2. Don't throw an AI-generated argument at me that you don't even fully understand.
3. If you're preparing information for me, and it's overly verbose and wastes my time, I'll be twice as mad if it's obvious AI than if it's obviously human. This is basically the article'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.
This single headline perfectly captures what I have been thinking. It'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're pointing out a hallucination) gets an AI-generated response with AI-generated amendments, It doesn'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's not like there is a lack of PRs to review.
It looks like the sentiment isn't just isolated for me.
This won't help. Your wall of text will just get fed right back into the LLM.
Do you want to put the same effort into your job when nobody else does, or should you reserve your thoughts and just feed it back into the LLM?
The LLMs are being advertised as output increasers but companies so far are using them as excuses to fire people instead of creating previously unbelievable things. It might be better to feed your coworkers output back in and use your thoughts to start the company you thought you never had time for.
And once you start playing the game, then one day - it doesn't take long - you wake up and ask yourself if this is how you want to spend 8 hours of your life monday through friday. I think a lot of us are saying no but now need to figure out where our money is going to come from. I don't have the answers.
AI isn’t making developers more productive – it’s making them busier - https://leaddev.com/ai/ai-isnt-making-developers-more-produc... - June 11th, 2026
If they can't explain their own code then it is by default a bad pull request.
At the end of the day, everyone's time is being wasted on tokens and on the increasing cognitive complexity of AI generated code.
Actively drags down the morale and productivity of their team (because everyone is getting flooded with AI slop PR's)
AND costs far too much money relative to everyone else doing actual work? (token usage)
By god they sound like management material
Not necessary. Use Haiku.
The response doesn'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.
I wonder if that's occurred to him.
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)
"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.
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?
I understand that the information may be accurate, even helpful at times, but feeling like I'm constantly talking to an AI chat bot all the time gets tiring. And I don't appreciate having to double-check everyone else's AI generated responses for them.
Obviously you have to communicate with your coworkers. But I think the solution has to essential be: "Im not going to read that."
I have had coworkers say "Oh I don't know, Claude added that" in response to questions like that without even a hint of shame or self-reflection.
Or if you don't care you can just ignore this persons messages.
Yes, "not actually doing his job". If he's sending you un-reviewed, un-filtered, untouched AI output, that's not doing his job.
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'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're getting away with it. If managers aren't willing to intervene, or worse if they encourage this due to the volume of output that seems to be appearing, it's only going to get worse.
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.
The problem with the personality above is that the person isn't playing like a team (like you said) but as an individual maximizing their own visibility while loading their coworkers up with the review effort. They found an asymmetry to abuse (they generate text easily, coworkers get a lot of extra work to review it). They don't care what it costs their coworkers. They just like that it makes them look good.
the honest truth is that maybe 10-20% of SWE (at best) are “good”. sure it is harsh but i won't lie. if you're good you'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.
and even at "good" companies you have people who can game the system to get in, and then they struggle to get anything done on time or be responsible for taking on and completing any initiatives bigger than a single task on a bigger scope.
I still think a single in person LC style (doesn't have to be LC per se, could be domain specific) logical thinking/reasoning exercise is useful. I want to ensure the person can actually put 2 and 2 together and think. This is just a fast filter.
If they seem like they can think, then I like to do 2-3 systems design interviews. I'll try to give them something related to things I like, such as graph structures, writing a complex query that needs to be dynamically generated, or something related to infrastructure or how they'd do something that I've already done. After all, this is MY project they're joining.
So far that has worked well.
Few more things -
I like to test if they are a humble type (they can work on a team putting ego on the side - the mission is our number 1 priority). if they say they know something that i know and asked, then they can be sure I'm going to drill them on it. if it turns out they lied, i'm not wasting more time. Thanks for your time, take care. This is very important to me. Just say you don't know, it isn't a big deal because ever since like 1994 that has not been an issue. You can just learn things online, and AI makes that even faster. I am never afraid to say I don't know something, and I've asked plenty of "dumb" questions (while doing some due diligence first) so I don't really mind.
Can they handle information overload? I am the type of person who has multiple branches in my head of actions I can take next, so while I may appear stressed I'm really not. Can they keep up? Our goal as software engineers should be to come up with solutions that solve the problem in a way that makes building on it simpler in the future. My goal is simplicity and effectiveness. So I'll see if they can keep up, and eventually reduce the work to be done into atomic pieces. This is a fun exercise because it is collaborative and we get to bounce ideas fast back and forth.
Finally, I like to let them use their favorite tools, including AI tools (codex, claude, some ppl have esoteric custom stuff which is cool), to solve a problem together. It might be code related, it might not. Really depends on my mood. I like to see how they work and what sort of output they can come up with. This filters out people who only ask AI stuff, instead of having some framework they've already developed to be effective.
Honestly I don't know how to scale this process. I'm not really going to feel bad either about firing fast, ultimately this is a business and I don't want customers to suffer because we have some issues internally.
At the same time, I wonder if I even need to build out an org with 100s of people. That was an inefficiency (look at all the layoffs), and it is traumatic.
If I can find a few great people who can be supercharged and turbocharged and electrified with AI, then they can take on & own bigger responsibilities. My number 1 goal is to ensure they're with me on the mission, and after that all things seem to sort of fit into place.
Prompt used to generate this message: "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."
If they're gonna spy on me with AI cameras, I can oppose them with AI research. :)
Edit: it's a joke people
[0] https://abner.page/post/are-we-harold-bloom/
The serfs will till and sow the server fields!
In the past you had coworker who produced volumes of code. Same principle.
I think I'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't be able to because of how capable the technology becomes?) that what I'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.
For AI -> AI you kind of want a hand over document as an attachment to an email. Only thing here is making sure there'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/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)
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.
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.
Sometimes human effort doesm't have to be complicated though (concise communications)
That said, roguelikes are awesome. So there is definitely a place for simulated effort.
Labeling what is "AI" would be like highlighting in an email what I'm obligated to say by HR, my boss, etc. It doesn't make anything less boneheaded.
Human effort was already low before AI and now it's even lower. Garbage in, garbage out.
Because the prompt is the quintessence of intent regarding the information to be conveyed.
Now you have to add typos and not use completely standard elements of style that some people have been using for ages, like emdashes and "it's not X, it's Y"
The labor theory of value doesn't work for documents any more than it works for anything else. If I do something that's easy for me, and it's valuable to you, you'll still want it. If I do something that'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're valuable, people will want to read them. Whether it was unpleasant for someone to create them isn't a factor.
So where is this slogan coming from? Are people just afraid to admit that the documents they're getting are valueless?
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.
Reading AI-generated text for hours every day, it's obvious to me.
I take care to make my messages easily readable. I don't care if they're AI-made, as long as they're short.
I'm a very verbose person, and if I don't make an effort at being concise, I'm just as annoying as the average AI.
Being flooded with AI text every day has made me appreciate brevity because I'm exposed to so little of it.
With half a dozen people who don't read or listen to half of what the others do, slop + cognitive drift is a bad cocktail.
It'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.
---
> 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'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.
---
> Keeping AI generated content clearly labeled and demonstrating human effort helps show consideration for teammates
I actually like the shamelessness, because it's honest.
So often this year when I ask "why did you do X?" pointing at a line, my colleague doesn't know.
Because they didn't really write that line, and they didn'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'd like to see more of it.
One way is to spend more time owning "cognitive debt" as part of the daily cycle.
If people are now wincing at longform text because they automatically assume it was LLM-generated, then that bodes ill.
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'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'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'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'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's actually way more inefficient for you now. Plus, if you're lucky enough to be looked at and they like you, you probably have to go for an in-person audition anyway so what's happened here? You've just added another layer and way more work.
Companies think they're "winning" here by saving labor but I think that's short-sighted. What'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]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1gFSENorEY
I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
The argument that "using AI to generate text is disrespectful because it took no effort to write" misses the point. Respect for the recipient is measured by whether the message serves the recipient's needs, not how it is produced. Similarly, any errors are the senders responsibility, and not the fault of the tools they used.
However, I don't blame anybody for having red lines like this:
1. Don'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's what I wanted I'd have done it myself.
2. Don't throw an AI-generated argument at me that you don't even fully understand.
3. If you're preparing information for me, and it's overly verbose and wastes my time, I'll be twice as mad if it's obvious AI than if it's obviously human. This is basically the article'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.
Use whatever tool does the job, and own it if you use the wrong tool and it sucks.
You don't need an ad when you already have their attention. The blog post title just sucks. They really mean "don't waste my time with this shit".