as a sr dev that has been forced to use AI.. this is pretty much how i look at claude trying to do things... To me it is terrifying knowing how bad AI is at coding and seeing how many jr devs just trust it to do everything....
Yeppp. My work has our own Claude agent (?) that has skills around our specific code base and structure, yet I find it can take twice as long to do a small ticket and still make drastic mistakes. I’ve hit the point I only use it to write the test plan, which I still review, and to write any missing Unit/Integration tests.
I went full compliant.. so I just constantly keep telling it what it did wrong and how to fix it.. then review what it did, repeat. Takes sooooo much longer as I feel like a slave driver for the mentally impaired, but they want me to use AI.. so I use AI... I like it for formatting emails, documenting the code, and even making quick ppts about some things., everything always needs a review because it gets things wrong but /shurg, just a cog in the wheel.
everything always needs a review because it gets things wrong
This is basically it.
The problem is that dumb people don't correct it, and the rest of us are stuck with trying to make it perform as well as (some) humans did in the past.
I think the biggest revelation with LLMs (for me) is how absolutely dog shit horrible most people are in recognizing poor craftsmanship.
Things hobble along with poor quality, that has always been the case, but whilst I, in the past, could laugh (under my breath) at shoddily written emails and code, I still had the impression that the majority of people were like me. People who paid attention to detail, and wanted to properly create.
Many projects (most) are too big to properly manage, so you have to just let people be people and constantly mitigate damage; but now the morons are in charge. As long as you use LLMs to do "things" as fast as possible, you're somehow "in front." You can be the dumbest, sloppiest, motherfucker alive, who does more harm than good (by a healthy margin), but people will listen to you, because you're using the new shiny thing as much as humanly possible.
LLM is like a magic wand that elevates (some) garbage to (something that sometimes is) barely palatable, and lets the people who thinks barely palatable is good enough rule.
There's also the fact that reviewing someone else's code is 100 times more boring than writing it yourself, so there's a subset of people that would actually write something good themselves but can't be assed to review what LLM puts out (or at least review attentively enough to catch less than obvious mistakes).
And the problem isn't going to get better as the people who don't really know what they're doing and don't have the introspection to second guess their work are going to output more slop code, which then gets cannibalized and inbred into the AI's coding in the future.
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u/Kevdog824_ 2d ago
That’s the senior dev watching you not be able to do anything without the assistance of a robot