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.

I agree and I’m surprised more people don’t get this. Bad behaviors aren’t suddenly okay because AI makes them easy.

If you are wasting time you may be value negative to a business. If you are value negative over the long run you should be let go.

We’re ultimately here to make money, not just pump out characters into text files.

> We’re ultimately here to make money, not just pump out characters into text files.

Different projects have other incentives. Dealing with AI slop from internet randos is a very real problem in open-source codebases. I've pretty much just stopped reviewing code from people that I don't know on one project that I work on when it's obviously going to take way more time than it would have done to do the patch myself. There used to be an incentive to help educate new contributors, of course, but now I can't know whether that is even happening.