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.
Where do you people work where you cant just tell the manager how stupid that is? They’re part of your team and their role requires them lean on the expertise of their team. So provide your expertise and make the case why that shouldnt happen. It should be relatively easy given they arent training the model so it wont actually learn anything from your comments it will just waste money/time.
Why comment on something you didn’t read?
I did read it thats just not what I’m talking about. That doesnt come off as directly pushing back. It comes off as whining about the change and immediately accepting it and the manager just pandering a bit.
Lucky for us, people on the Internet know everything from a couple of sentences. I’m glad the Internet grants us the knowledge to always safely talk out of our ass with barely any context. Because after all, being on the Internet means knowing when a person is lying or is simply just not right about their own lives.
Maybe you meant it sucks that their manager didn’t actually listen, but what it came across as was a dickheaded “why are you working at such a bad place? This is your fault op” and frankly that continues to be your tone.
Yeah that is my tone. I know its not their fault its being pushed im just shocked that something that fucking stupid can be proposed and its a little rant to the manager and then ok back to work in the new system. In a healthy workplace this is such a great topic to have a fight about because they’re completely in the right and they need to fight with their manager so their manager can fight with their manager to get something changed.
I don’t expect ai code reviews to be removed fully but I’d expect the no code part to be dropped pretty easily if the work environment is sane. Yes i know the workplace is probably cooked given the other things mentioned but its still shocking how a workplace can be that dysfunctional.
That’s a big assumption these days, and in this case, it very clearly is not. Upper management clearly has a terminal case of AI brainrot, and nothing he does is going to change that. Hearing his complaint and agreeing with it is the only thing his manager can do, because the manager’s manager has his head so far up his own ass that he won’t hear a word of it.
OP detailed that they did push back in the way they felt appropriate, probably more than most would have done. Not everyone is privileged enough to risk their job by refusing to comply with company policy. This is a terrible reaction on your part and is destructive to the ideals of the community.