How to handle manager adding AI bs to our codebase/designs etc.

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Article news.ycombinator.com

How to handle manager adding AI bs to our codebase/designs etc.

Joined the company out of college with like 5-6 years coding hobby projects etc. & started a year ago. I'm basically the highest performer in my team, get more stories & points/higher complexity tasks & have my work done way quicker with virtually no defects etc.etc. In comparison, most of the team spends like 2/3 the sprint getting their stories deployed & then up until the end of the sprint fixing the defects (usually producing defects that we don't catch until either I have to work in their area or the tester's find it randomly months later in regression)

So recently the company's been trying to pump the stock so they asked everyone to go all in on AI dev work. Ok fine, there are good & bad uses for AI & if ur atleast checking the code, it's np. Well, the team took that as they should stop using their brain at all. Basically all of the code I see is over-engineered BS that will almost always cause defects or introduces a ton of technical debt. In my opinion they are probably just producing negative work where in the next sprint Im usually the one who's assigned to fix that stuff (bec i always compl my work quickly).

So far I thought this sort of bs was just limited to my coworkers & managers would actually take care to produce good work / check our PR's carefully, using AI but checking it thoroughly. WRONG. First thing that I noticed is that the technical design document was like 5 pages long but since I wasn't really familiar with that part of the codebase I sort of just assumed it was accurate. Big mistake, after about a day turns out half the doc was just AI bs with nonsense randomly scattered throughout. I have had occasions where I ask my coworkers how their code works (bec AI added overengineered bs), and they literally can't explain it at all.

Anyway I was able to figure that stuff out and released the PR to my boss to review. Upon releasing it, he asked me to ask the AI to review the work and add the changes, I went ahead and did that and there were some obv AI hallucinations but some valid points like update the docs, add some error handling etc, & I made the changes. I release it back to him and he asks to have a call and we talk about it, turns out his AI had some other suggestions (to him), we went through it and figured out what was BS and which parts were valid (issues that were caused by the shitty design doc) & I made the updates on the call & pushed them.

an hour later the guy comes back and says something like "I asked the AI for some more recommendations, can you check the branch and compare the diffs to yours". So I look at the branch & sure enough it had all the BS we discussed on the call & determined was BS. It also changed the structure arbitarily making it more complicated & difficult to decouple & maintain. From what I can tell, either no one understands the codebase, can't understand the AI's code, or are just too lazy to think. A lot of what the AI does is based on previous code in the codebase, code that could be like 10 years old and be written like shit yet the AI will still recommend will follow that idea etc.etc

Im getting pretty dishearted, im literally the lowest ranking (in level) developer on the team yet doing the most work with the best quality (business analysts on the team have literally called this out), but im still paid the least & have to deal with the most BS.

Discussion 4 comments · 5 points · LandOfMightDev · 11d
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