I promise this blog will have more than an engineer yelling at the clouds about LLM pain. I was actually working on a retrospective on X-Men Legends, or my experiences building an NES emulator in Rust. However slop PRs started hitting a codebase I maintain at work. And like any healthy individual I wish to commiserate about this with others on the internet.
I’d like to think I have some ability for introspection. Is it me that’s the problem? Am I just not with it anymore? It’s one thing to see the spam come in and go “man this sucks”. But it’s another thing to have to explain to misguided individuals why their behavior is destructive. This is my attempt at delving into the “why”. Why do these slop PRs bother me so much? Why do they feel like such a drain?
I’m afraid it’s worse than just moving the bottleneck to review/due-diligence.
C-suits don’t like to admit this, because it challenges the assumption that job roles are all about input and output with no messy internal state to worry about, but…
When you write some code, the code isn’t the only thing that you make. You also develop a mental model of how the code works, how you wish it would work, the distance between those two, and some sense of the possible paths that could get you there.
That mental model is ultimately the more important part for the long-term health of the project. Coding is more an activity of communication between people; having an artifact that tells the computer what to do is almost an incidental side-effect of successful communication.
Yeah that’s a real good point. I focused a lot on the short term issues of agentic slop but you’re right the long term impact of this is going to be staggering.
100%. Something I wanted to touch on in my post but cut because I couldn’t weave it in well was more on the relationship with “The Problem” and “The Code”. Pre-AI coding acted as a forcing function for the problem context. It’s really hard to effectively build software without understanding what you’re ultimately driving towards. With agentic coding we’re stripping that forcing function out.
Institutional knowledge is already something that’s been hard to quantify and value by C-suites and now you’re ripping out the crucial mechanism for building that.
I see a lot of memes with people being like “in 5 years we’re just gonna press yes and not understand what the agent is doing” and I keep thinking “why do people think this is funny?”
I understand why you cut it. There is a lot that you could dig into there, and you would really have to go into detail it you wanna convince the suits that can only think in terms of KPIs.
The forcing function is a good way of looking at it. We’re not really doing the same thing but faster. We’re doing less, and that naturally takes less time. AI made understanding optional.
I kinda wonder to what extent coding is actually a domain that AI is uniquely “good at” vs simply how well coding activities are able to survive on artifacts which are produced but not understood.
It seems like something we were already exceptionally capable of tolerating, compared to other sectors.