Pointless rant. Please ignore. I’m a software developer and we all know how AI has changed our industry. How we work or why we’re fired and why we can’t afford PCs.
Anyways, we’re already all forced to use AI already and we’re already atrophying the minds of our juniors. It’s great.
New team meeting and one of our managers tells us that we’re never going to write code anymore at all. The AI will read the JIRA ticket and create the pull request (change request to the codebase) on GitHub. Our job is to only review the code on GitHub and then rank how well AI did and then comment and then get AI to fix it. We have to do this so we can improve the AI process. Which is funny because none of the people who plan this AI shit are data scientists. The only way they can change things is by promoting, it’s not like we’re releasing our own coding models but anyways … He’s like, now you should be able to do much more work and just review PRs all day now and that we should never be doing only one thing. You can only tell AI through a GitHub comment to fix a mistake and then you can start reviewing the next thing.
We were like, if it’s a simple fix why can’t we just fix it?
“Because we need to improve the AI process”
But then, I have to context switch.
“Yes that’s the point you can come back to it later”
Why come back to it later when we can solve it now? We can even use AI to solve it now.
“No, we want you just comment on the PR so the bot can handle it”
Context switching is free apparently… It’s actually infuriating because apparently we’re not using IDEs any more. I personally use the GitHub plugin to review PRs in my IDE but no one else seems to do it so I don’t think they even took that into account.
These guys have auto merged AI code that’s taken us weeks to unravel and which we still haven’t fully been able to fix. They just merge shit all the time and a lot of it is fucking slip. AI merged hundreds of tests and no one cares when they break. They didn’t configure prettier because AI doesn’t use it so it breaks out formatting when humans do it.
I ranted to my own manager for 30 minutes about it today and he was just as upset because every developer is now asking what exactly are they doing. My manager asked me what I would do. I said the process sucks but what are we supposed to do as devs. If I review 20 PRs a day, how is the company going to ensure my skills are gonna be sharp? What are we doing about taking in ideas from regular devs? How do we ensure code ownership when we’re just merging tickets we don’t write and code we had no hand in shaping?
Sorry. I actually thought I had faith in my company with AI because they were coming up with thoughtful approaches but it seems like utter incompetence.
This is what I bring up in my complaints all the damn time when I see this.
They arent wrong here but they missed an incredibly critical part.
Did they train you on how you do that?
Cuz it sounds like they haven’t, because that simple little “improve the process” remark is 99.9% of the goddamn challenge and it takes a tonme of training and practice to know how you do that well.
You can eventually reach the point this person wants but you need entire libraries of skill files and tools setup to do it.
Is your entire codebase pre-emptively vectorized for semantic search yet? Im guessing no.
Do you have a full set of bespoke per-agent toolsets to streamline their capabilities and avoid context bloat?
Do you have a solid repo of skill files you all share and constantly refine everyday to slowly patch info gaps and correct mistakes the agents make?
If all of this sounds like gibberish to you, this is the damn problem with companies now.
I keep saying it like this:
If you hand all your employees nailguns, tell them all they must use nailguns for their job now, but give them zero training on how to use nailguns, you are gonna have a bad time.
But it is so easy! You just make a comment saying "don’t make mistakes, pwetty pleeease!” and the AI will do the rest!
This is a very good take. They’re starting a circle and telling OP to just draw the rest of the fucking owl. And I’m sure if OP takes a week to do some ground work to make it possible they’ll be unhappy because no features.
We do that.
Still meh outcomes.
(Instead of vectorization we leverage language mcp servers and graph database of features vs code)
Meh is actually refinable at least, you go from toxic waste code that is actively harmful, to meh code that isnt great but at least you can code review it and iterate to improve via directives.
The toxic waste code just wastes everyone’s time.