When 60-80% or so of your PR can be refactored away then it’s a crap PR and honestly never should have been one.
So their time savings in getting AI help to write their code means that you spend more of your presumably more expensive time doing reviews and educating them about slop removal instead of some higher-value activity. Sounds like you’re veering into negative ROI for the AI use if that’s true.
Luckily, I don’t review PRs very often, I have people to do that. But the general principle is that the content of a PR is the responsibility of the submitter, regardless of its source. Wrong algorithm? Their fault. No-good UTs? Their fault. Inappropriate or unsafe dependencies? Their fault. Slop? Their fault.
Luckily, with the work we do, there’s often nothing someone could train an LLM on, so we don’t see all that many PRs with AI-generated content, unless we’re using some well-known commodity library or framework in a common way. And that was always the easy stuff anyway.
A slop PR should be the submitter’s responsibility, but if they’re trying to push out unreviewed slop, you know they’re just going to ask an LLM to refactor it instead of looking at it themselves. The best response is just to reject it outright and have someone else work on a new solution.
So their time savings in getting AI help to write their code means that you spend more of your presumably more expensive time doing reviews and educating them about slop removal instead of some higher-value activity. Sounds like you’re veering into negative ROI for the AI use if that’s true.
Luckily, I don’t review PRs very often, I have people to do that. But the general principle is that the content of a PR is the responsibility of the submitter, regardless of its source. Wrong algorithm? Their fault. No-good UTs? Their fault. Inappropriate or unsafe dependencies? Their fault. Slop? Their fault.
Luckily, with the work we do, there’s often nothing someone could train an LLM on, so we don’t see all that many PRs with AI-generated content, unless we’re using some well-known commodity library or framework in a common way. And that was always the easy stuff anyway.
A slop PR should be the submitter’s responsibility, but if they’re trying to push out unreviewed slop, you know they’re just going to ask an LLM to refactor it instead of looking at it themselves. The best response is just to reject it outright and have someone else work on a new solution.