I quit my previous job in part because I couldn’t deal with the influx of terrible, unreliable, dangerous, bloated, nonsensical, not even working code that was suddenly pushed into one of the projects I was working on. That project is now completely dead, they froze it on some arbitrary version.
When junior dev makes a mistake, you can explain it to them and they will not make it again. When they use llm to make a mistake, there is nothing to explain to anyone.
I compare this shake more to an earthquake than to anything positive you can associate with shaking.
And so, the problem wasn’t the ai/llm, it was the person who said “looks good” without even looking at the generated code, and then the person who read that pull request and said, again without reading the code, “lgtm”.
If you have good policies then it doesn’t matter how many bad practice’s are used, it still won’t be merged.
The only overhead is that you have to read all the requests but if it’s an internal project then telling everyone to read and understand their code shouldn’t be the issue.
The problem here is that a lot of the time looking for hidden problem is harder than writing good code from scratch. And you will always be at a danger that llm snuck some sneaky undefined behaviour past you. There is a whole plethora of standards, conventions, and good practices that help humans to avoid it, which llm can ignore at any random point.
So you’re either not spending enough time on review or missing whole lot of bullshit. In my experience, in my field, right now, this review time is more time consuming and more painful than avoiding it in the first place.
Don’t underestimate how degrading and energy sucking it is for a professional to spend most of the working time sitting through autogenerated garbage, and how inefficient it is.
This is a problem with your team/project. It’s not a problem with the technology.
A technology that makes people put bad code is a problematic technology. If your team/project managed to overcome it’s problems so far doesn’t mean it is good or overall helpful. Peoole not seeing the problem is actually the worst part.
