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 was told I have to adopt agentic AI or I can’t be promised to stay around for too long.
Meanwhile I’m catching all the slop the other devs submit.
I don’t get it. This is will destroy people already bad at coding in the long run, then people like me who really don’t want to implement an agentic (whatever that is) but find all the flaws in the PR, get burned in the long run.
Find a company that values engineers. The one you’re at doesn’t, whether they understand that or not.
I feel ya. I’ve been told the same thing at my job as well.
I’d say “find a new gig” but honestly every place has been bitten by this hype train it seems like.
I’ve been doing a hybrid approach where I use the chatbot to do rudimentary things like label renames and then just do a lot of my work “the normal way”. That way I log some token usage to say I use the tools and then bet that my output isn’t going to be drastically different from my coworkers.
Then when the hype train dies we can all hopefully go back to doing what we do best. It’s just a shitty period that I hope we can ride out.