The Programmer Identity Crisis

To me, the most salient point was this:

> Code reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as they come to the crushing realization that they are now the first layer of quality control instead of one of the last. Asked to review; forced to pick apart. Calling out freshly added functions that are never called, hallucinated library additions, and obvious runtime or compilation errors. All while the author—who clearly only skimmed their “own” code—is taking no responsibility, going “whoopsie, Claude wrote that. Silly AI, ha-ha.”

LLMs have made Brandolini's law ("The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it") perhaps understated. When an inexperienced or just inexpert developer can generate thousands of lines of code in minutes, the responsibility for keeping a system correct & sane gets offloaded to the reviewers who still know how to reason with human intelligence.

As a litmus test, look at a PR's added/removed LoC delta. LLM-written ones are almost entirely additive, whereas good senior engineers often remove as much code as they add.

In my opinion this is another case where people look at it as a technical problem when it's actually a people problem. If someone does it once, they get a stern message about it. If it happens twice, it gets rejected and sent to their manager. Regardless of how you authored a pull request, you are signing off on it with your name. If it's garbage, then you're responsible.

The problem is leadership buy in. The person throwing the LLM slop at github has great metrics when the leadership are looking at cursor usage, lines of code, PR numbers, while the person slowing down to actually read wtf the other people are submitting is now so drowning in slop that they have less time to produce on their own. So the execs look at it as the person complaining "not keeping up with the times".

If leadership is that inept, then this is likely only 1 of many problems they are creating for the organization. I would be looking for alternative employment ASAP.

the issue isn't recognizing malign influence within your current organization... it's an issue throughout the entire industry, and I think what we're all afraid of is that it's becoming more inevitable every day, because we're not the ones who have the final say. the luddites essentially failed, after all, because the wider world was not and is not ready for a discussion about quality versus profit.

A poor quality product can only be profitable if no high quality alternative exists (at a similar price point). Every time that's the case, it's an epic opportunity for anybody with the wherewithal to raise some funding and build that high quality alternative themselves. A dysfunctional industry running on AI slop will not be able to keep you from eating their lunch unless they can achieve some sort of regulatory capture, which would be a separate (political) issue.

Regarding your Luddite reference, I think the cost-vs-quality debate was actually the centerpiece of that incident. Would you rather pay $100 for a T-shirt that's only marginally better than one that costs $10? I certainly would not. People are constantly evaluating cost-quality tradeoffs when making purchasing decisions. The exact ratio of the tradeoff matters. There's always a price point at which something starts (or stops) making sense.