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 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.