Exactly. If you're too stupid or lazy to adequately vet what your LLM puts out yourself, it shouldn't be somebody else's job to wade through the sewage you're producing. You either shouldn't be using one or, if you can't do your job without it, you shouldn't have that job.

—Someone who doesn't use genAI but has spent way too much time digging through LLM slop

I am not a developer, but:

I told the owner of the company recently that, and I quote, "I will fucking kill myself if my job becomes reviewing AI output"

It's going to make snr devs get fired, surely?

They either refuse to sign off when boss wants them to and get fired or sign off and get fired when ai code they signed off on causes issues.

You’re absolutely right!

it's pretty fucking stark right? these are the devs that stayed after management mandated they USE the shit in the first place, now they want the same devs to become responsible for what the shit does to their codebases.

“You are now a senior auditor.”

Lol I would be your Jr, except instead of 10 seconds of silence it would be 10 seconds of me frantically clacking on the keyboard "add a block to this for these packages with proper syntax, I forgot to include it" to claude. Then I'd of course be all discombobulated and shit so I wouldn't even bother to open code, I'd just ctrl-c about 100 lines somewhere around the general area of where I think the new code block should go, then ctrl-v the whole thing into the chat box because why not the company is paying out the dick for these tokens so might as well use them.

And two weeks later half our website crashes which results in you having to go to a meeting where management tells you to keep a closer eye on me. Which is basically what you had been already doing before AI but now you get to babysit me and claude!

Just to add to this:

• When a senior dev reviews code from a more junior dev and gives feedback the more junior person (generally) learns from it.
• When a senior dev reviews code from an AI, the AI does not learn from it.

So beyond the first order effects you pointed out - the using of more time from more experience and hence expensive people - there is a second order effect due of loss of improvement in the making of code which is both persistent and cumulative with time: every review and feedback of the code from a junior dev reduces forever the future need for that, whilst every review and feedback of the code from an AI has no impact at all in need for it in the future.

Given enough time, the total time wasted in reviews and feedback for code from junior devs is limited - because they eventually learn enough not to do such mistakes - but the total time wasted in reviews and feedback for code from an AI is unlimited - because it will never improve.

It'll be temporary, a gut reaction to add more experienced engineers in the loop. These folks will try to codify and then push better checks/guardrails into CI/CD and tooling to save themselves time. Given how new this all is, it's almost the blind leading the blind though.

Amazon might also have some poor system boundaries, leading to non-critical systems/code impacting critical systems. Or they just let junior devs with their AI tools run wild on critical components without adequate guardrails... also likely. :-P

We may start to see people realize that "have the AI generate slop, humans will catch the mistakes" actually is different from "have humans generate robust code."

I guarantee there's so much pressure on those engineers to deliver code that they rubber stamp a ton of it with the intention of "fixing it later"

Source: I've worked in software for 20+ years and know a lot of folks working for and who have worked for Amazon

the way private companies work is that they require their employees to produce more than is reasonable given the work quality that is expected.

when this discrepancy is pointed out, it's handwaved away. when the discrepancy results in problems, as it most obviously will, somebody is found to place the blame on.

it's not the developer's faults. it's a management decision.

source: I'm talking out of my ass I'm just a salty employee who is seeing this happen at their own workplace when it didn't used to, at least not to this level

AI's greatest feature in the eyes of the Epstein class is the ability to shift responsibility. People will do all kinds of fucked up shit if they can shift the blame to someone else, and AI is the perfect bag holder.

Just ask the school of little girls in Iran which were likely targets picked by AI with out of date information about it being a barracks. Why bother confirming the target with current intel from the ground when no one's going to take the blame anyway?

If you ask a writer what is Ai good for? They will say it's good for art. But never use it for writing, because it's terrible at it.

If you ask a artist what is Ai good for? They will say it's good for writing. but never use it for art, because it's terrible at it.

Or I suppose add extra work by walking an AI tool through making small incremental changes.

I read it as "now a senior developer will be at fault for all AI code." Do you think they will have time to review all that code properly and do their jobs.

If you do this, you signal the AI isn't ready for production capabilities, which limits your sales groups capability to market it. Which is in reality the actual case and AI sucks and should never be trusted.

Likely, but you did not let poor code pass. That is valuable.

Unsurprisingly, there's a disconnect between executives/middle managers and people actually doing the job. The first group has fallen for the 10x productivity boost ads that the AI companies were selling them, while the actual boost for developers has been minimal, if any. That's why it's being pushed hard from the top.

This 1000x. You think that senior dev got to that level hoping one day all they'd have to do is evaluate randomly generated code? No! They want to create, build, design, integrate, share. Cut out the middle, useless step and get back to the work these professionals have dedicated their careers to.

I think you already know the answer to that.

If nunneries are as gay as I always imagined in my head, I’m in.

They don’t want to break the things that hurt their bottom line.

Break society and make everyone hate each other? Hey buddy - small price to pay. Gotta think of the shareholders, after all. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Amazon saves the wages of a senior dev by doing that, but then they get outages costing them the wages of that senior dev for decades. I doubt the goal is to blame senior devs. If they wanted them gone they could easily fire them.

If only the lessons were painful for them and not just us/the workers.

Wonder what the turnover rate in executives is. I bet it is about 8 years.

I hear it's been a stressful time. I'm in Seattle. Practically everyone knows someone or other who works at AWS.