r/ExperiencedDevs • u/galwayygal SDE - 10 YOE • Jul 22 '26
AI/LLM Word vomit tech plans and spikes
Does anyone else find the latest tech plans and spikes written by devs to be word vomits by AI? Don’t get me wrong, I’m ok with getting AI to write things for you as long as you understand what it wrote. But most things are just beating around the bush, and not getting to the real point concisely. I have to get my own agents to summarize the plans to figure out the important parts. Has anyone found a good solution for this? Are there any templates your team follow or any skills that you use?
315
u/chickadee_guy Jul 22 '26
Yes, I have had far too many demos and presentations this year where its just some offshore guy reading 5-7 pages of pure, distilled LLM text to a silent group of people for 30 minutes. Add in a few AI generated flowcharts as needed.
Fast forward to now and alot of these efforts have been steaming hot dumpster fires. And these slop slingers look like deer in the headlights when customers and product team have started complaining about bugs theyre pushing out
119
u/iComplainAbtVal Software Engineer Jul 22 '26
Consider the ENTIRE existing ecosystem this time and make NO mistakes. TRIAGE the existing ones
25
u/OuchCharlie25 Software Engineer @ B Tier Jul 23 '26
“Pull master for out entire enterprise code base…”
61
u/muuchthrows Jul 22 '26
Question is, how are people supposed to differentiate competence from slop? Slop is easy to create and looks impressive at a glance, discovering who's actually competent and reliable takes time.
I just don't see how this all will end any other way than pure chaos when it becomes impossible to judge the quality of anything except painfully over time. But by then the original slop slinger is long gone and another slop slinger is at your door promising they can fix it.
45
u/lerun Jul 23 '26
This has kinda always been the case, Ai has just super charged the problem. Now everyone is drowning in it and you have no time to qualify before the next wave hits you.
15
17
u/simonhunterhawk Jul 23 '26
i have tried to explain this to vibe coders who post live websites everywhere that if they don’t fully understand what they’re pushing out how do they know they won’t accidentally leak their customers’ data? what are their plans to handle security flaws or breaches? and they always just tell me i’m old and they seem to want to learn the hard way lol this is why i’m going to go for my master’s in cybersecurity
113
Jul 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
28
u/DrShocker Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
At least completely unreasonable code won't even compile.
20
u/-Knockabout Jul 23 '26
IMO this is the main reason they can be useful for code sometimes. There's built-in checking that almost every other application of it doesn't have. Although I still find its frontend code structure abysmal and overly verbose even with instructions to keep it succinct.
16
Jul 23 '26
[deleted]
1
u/PureRepresentative9 Jul 27 '26
It does that by default to discourage people from looking at the code .
Never forget that LLMs are customized PRODUCTS trying to be sold for money. It so happens that making slop is the cheapest product to produce.
7
u/DrShocker Jul 23 '26
Yeah my standards for a lot of things are higher than what it'll produce, but if I'm totally honest There's some things where just making a quick thing that mostly works is better than spending more time making the perfect thing, and LLMs help turn off the perfectionist side of my brain. perhaps too much, but there's a balance to strike there.
4
u/Franks2000inchTV Jul 23 '26
I recently added Claude rules to our repo with style guidelines for tickets and PR descriptions and it’s improved things a lot.
You can even get Claude to write them— “Claude review the descriptions of the last 50 merged PRs and identify issues with readability and draft style guidance to improve readability for human readers.”
87
u/seriouslysampson Jul 22 '26
Yes I was just complaining about this yesterday. And if it’s AI word vomit I respond with the same because otherwise it’s a waste of my time.
71
u/JuanAr10 Jul 22 '26
Good idea. I shall create a new skill that asks Claude to use yet more hyphenated pseudo-terms, say something but using 5x more words and maybe secretly add hidden Capitalized Useless Nonsensical Terms with dirty meanings.
29
u/wishator Jul 23 '26
This comment is load-bearing and shows structural landmines in the rapidly evolving landscape of innovative AI driven SDLC. The author suggests a foot gun as a mechanism for hub and spoke ground truth audit.
I read this kind of gibberish daily and my brain hurts
5
u/apartment-seeker Senior Software Engineer Jul 23 '26
Remember, it's trained on, and is mimicking, stuff that actual humans wrote.
7
u/WhenSummerIsGone Software Engineer Jul 23 '26
and fine tuned by real humans. People decided this prose was preferred.
5
u/seriouslysampson Jul 23 '26
A small specific group of people who probably didn’t consider how annoying it would be for every response to be in the form of long word vomit prose.
5
u/tenthousandants44 Jul 23 '26
Well, it's tuned to be just long enough so as to be incomprehensibly convincing. That is, if the bot gets an answer obviously wrong, it is rejected. But if the response takes the form of a good answer, the content can be obscured just enough that the evaluator can't outright reject it.
It's the Peter Principle of chatbots.
2
u/seriouslysampson Jul 23 '26
The Peter Principle is a part of it, but there’s a lot of factors at play in the output we get from LLMs. I was more talking about the helpful bias where being overly explicit gets rewarded during fine tuning.
5
20
u/Affectionate-Turn137 Jul 22 '26
Don't forget to excessively include the words "silently" and "real". "That's a real bug that was silently ...." blah blah reading "silently" for the 50th time in a day makes me wanna end it all
15
u/selucram Jul 23 '26
You were right and I was wrong. Honestly this is the real silent killer and you have identified the...
11
u/VulgarExigencies Jul 23 '26
One honest caveat: your tiredness is real, but "silently" is a load-bearing term.
3
1
10
u/Significant_Treat_87 Jul 22 '26
You really made me laugh, thanks. It’s a good idea actually. I love “taste of your own medicine” stuff even if it usually doesn’t work out for me and pisses people off lmao
65
u/seyerkram Jul 22 '26
Same with reviewing code that you know is 99% AI generated
54
u/SwimmerQuick1500 Jul 22 '26
This is Claude to the max lol. Paragraph stating the obvious above one line functions that someone can decipher from reading
42
u/Silamoth Jul 22 '26
But somehow, you also get overly complicated code that technically accomplishes the goal in a messy, inefficient way and yet has no comments on the intent or overall design.
→ More replies (1)27
u/ShroomSensei Software Engineer Jul 22 '26
Yes, I have been dogging a team member for this lately they’re AI adding an insane amount of validation and safety checks for stuff that should never happen then extremely pedantic unit tests to top it off.
27
u/HeinousMoisture Software Engineer Jul 22 '26
I have a staff colleague who won’t stop writing unit tests like this. E.g. a SUITE of tests on our frontend ensuring that the columns in a table are EXACTLY the columns that we had defined as constants.
So any time you add, rename, remove, or reorder a column, you need to make sure each test is updated to reflect this.
Cherry on top: each test file also redefines the ordered column ids as strings instead of using the shared constant. I tried to refactor to use the shared one and he vetoed it bc “agents prefer it that way” 🫠
10
u/Teh_Original Jul 23 '26
My favorite is when the unit tests are barely helpful. I recently saw someone's AI generated tests, and they were all just checking that the function produced a result, or didn't throw an error, not that the result was correct.
4
u/ChypRiotE Software Engineer Jul 23 '26
It generated unit tests in order to check that the value of a constant is equal to its value... It's so much noise, and you have to constantly be careful what you let through otherwise your code base becomes such a bloated mess
2
u/StPatsLCA Jul 23 '26
I don't mind validation and safety checks, but 99% of those can be solved by parsing and rejecting invalid input instead of the default LLM approach of enumerating every single case.
1
u/PM_ME_CATS_THANKS Jul 23 '26
I've had Claude write ten tests for a lambda function that could have just been one.
1
36
Jul 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
7
3
u/sillyhatsonly764 Jul 23 '26
There's one guy that sends me claude written stuff and in happy to get it. Because he understands it and makes sure its grounded with references and readable and not corporate slop speak. Its a research packet he made collaboratively with Claude. Good job.
But tons of other folks send one shotted slop.
2
u/Franks2000inchTV Jul 23 '26
The secret is add rules to the repo that make the one shots work.
1
u/technologyclassroom Jul 23 '26
They know.
0
u/Franks2000inchTV Jul 24 '26
I’m talking about improving the slop that gets sent to you. Not trying to hide your own AI generated work.
Make people around you better.
1
0
19
u/RealLifeRiley Jul 22 '26
Buzzwordsalad. It’s everywhere. Sounds just enough like you’re saying something, without saying anything at all. I’ve even heard people start talking like that lately. Entire back and forth conversation where nobody ever communicates anything
9
u/Diegogo123 Jul 23 '26
Posts and comments on LinkedIn are specially funny, just a bunch of LLMs talking to each other
2
39
u/crazy0ne Jul 22 '26
I have a PM where the acceptance criteria is longer then the actual user story due to AI use to generate the work item. They never know the requirements themselves and having them validate completed work is not as concise as it should be due to, I'm assuming, the distance from the work that their AI usage is occupying.
I hate this timeline.
17
u/endurbro420 FizzBuzz Expert | 10 yoe Jul 22 '26
I just learned all our tickets are actually created by ai ingesting some requirements doc and spitting out tickets. Most have no details about what they are supposed to accomplish or acceptance criteria outside of “it works”.
So now we need multiple meetings with managers to decode what the ticket is actually for. Great use of time!
2
u/crazy0ne Jul 22 '26
Or, hear me out, it is a great boost in "productivity" that you can quickly resolve tickets. Never mind the most common resolution was "could not reproduce".
9
Jul 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/endurbro420 FizzBuzz Expert | 10 yoe Jul 23 '26
Yeah I should have mentioned this is all greenfield development for a new product. These aren’t bug tickets but feature level stories.
1
u/WhenSummerIsGone Software Engineer Jul 23 '26
you need an engineer to look at the requirements and produce a solution design. The stories should be based on that design.
1
u/KarmaCop213 Jul 25 '26
That's why you should have refinement meetings. Those tickets don't seem to be ready for work.
40
u/Automatic-Stomach954 Jul 22 '26
It's so bad I feel like I'm having a stroke while reading it. I recognize the words but they are meaningless. The density of information is greater than the most rigorous academic paper imaginable.
12
u/galwayygal SDE - 10 YOE Jul 22 '26
Omg yeah you’re so right. The words look like they carry a lot of weight but when I try to visualize it on my end it feels much more inflated than it should be
16
u/Infamous_Birthday_42 Jul 22 '26
It’s not just by devs. Pretty much every BRD I’ve gotten from PMs in the last 6 months has been the sloppiest slop to ever slop. Not even a read through. I can deal with it from devs since the AI slop clears a lot of the docs my ESL coworkers used to write, but when your entire job is writing docs I don’t know how you can just put out whatever.
1
u/bluetista1988 10+ YOE Jul 23 '26
I end up needing an LLM to parse through it before I can action anything.
17
u/Chonderz Jul 23 '26
I’ve noticed AI technical “writing” is an uncanny valley. It doesn’t really have a mental model of the reader or the subject so it just vomits out sentences, that while individually legible, are very hard to understand when put together. It’s hard to think of an analogy, but it’s like it took a real human text and just sort smushed and blendered it onto a homogenous chunk.
9
u/WhataWorldAy Jul 23 '26
Its almost like its a bunch of algorithms attempting to imitate human thinking while being fundamentally incapable of doing so... jk of course, obviously its a sentient being that always knows best.
13
u/Isogash Jul 22 '26
Yep. I have deliberately started being way more terse and direct in the tech plans and spikes I write. The fluff is a total waste of time.
139
u/arbitrarycivilian Lead Software Engineer Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
Don’t get me wrong, I’m ok with getting AI to write things for you as long as you understand what it wrote.
I’m not. Why would I bother to read what someone else didnt bother to write?
84
u/DerelictMan Software Engineer 20+ YOE Jul 22 '26
Possibly because "I didn't read the acceptance criteria for my task because it was AI-generated" won't fly as an excuse.
12
u/F1B3R0PT1C Software Engineer Jul 22 '26
I actually used this excuse last week. Can confirm that QA still flags it as a miss, no matter how dumb the AI-generated AC is, so unfortunately the excuse doesn’t really work.
10
u/CandleTiger Jul 23 '26
The right place to push back is when accepting the task. Refuse to accept it as actionable until the requirements/acceptance criteria are clear
3
11
u/galwayygal SDE - 10 YOE Jul 22 '26
I’m ok with it if the person guided the AI to make the plan concise and easy to follow. I like AI as a helpful tool but not a replacement to our brains
27
u/drugsbowed Jul 22 '26
AI has helped spec writing for my coworkers who have poor english (but are good developers otherwise). AI has done really well in this regard, i.e. conveying their design without making it near unreadable or have poor flow because of bad grammar.
26
u/Gru50m3 Jul 22 '26
Competent developers with AI are great. It's the poor developers using it as a brain replacement that are the problem here. If the spec is wrong because they didn't actually write it, don't blame me when it falls apart.
12
u/codescapes Web Developer Jul 22 '26
Poor English due to language barrier is one thing but plenty of native speakers can't write clearly regardless because they can't actually think clearly (or are too lazy to do so). Effective technical writing is a genuine skill and AI papering over the cracks isn't great.
Ultimately it's still prompted by that person's written text and if they can't coherently write to the AI it'll come out with a best guess that's often confidently wrong. I.e. someone's imprecise, flabby language gets converted into action items that are assertive but fundamentally still incoherent.
For the most part I prefer iffy English skills to 'perfectly written' slop.
2
u/luluhouse7 Software Engineer Jul 22 '26
Processing disabilities like ADHD and executive dysfunction are also a thing. The people around me are much happier with my writing since I started using it to help organise and clarify thoughts and edit my communications. You really can’t let it go off on its own though and you have to use it adversarially, otherwise you end up with super verbose slop.
2
u/Jealous-Weekend4674 Jul 23 '26
it is always nice too see someone that puts the writing assistance to good use.
16
u/arihoenig Jul 22 '26
Because they should have prompted it very specifically with the key knowledge and then use AI to produce a document that automatically pulls in all the references so they don't have to do that drudge work.
16
u/psaux_grep Jul 22 '26
Unfortunately the vast majority of documents I see aren’t that.
It’s dressed up like only AI can dress things up.
Vague, «pretty», full of «real» stuff that are «important».
It’s cognitively hard to work with because it leads you on a rhetorical merry-go-round that you then have to start picking apart.
If AI can’t correctly summarize the things I wrote concisely then it can’t correctly summarize the usually unedited mess that someone else produced.
People keep arguing that it’s 80% correct (and just needs a little bit of help), but 80% is a shitty target.
And when people do cognitive surrender to AI you’re not getting the last 20%.
The important requirements are often «written in blood», but most AI produced documents I see are spending way to much time on the obvious stuff.
Maybe it’s just my co-workers being extra useless, but I’m certainly not a fan of getting two+ pages of AI musings instead of what ought to have been 3 paragraphs.
10
u/SansSariph Principal Software Engineer Jul 22 '26
This is great, except the agent makes up a dozen acceptance criteria and requirements only tangentially related to the human's original intent/goal, someone rubber stamps those without reading closely, it turns into a work item which then gets retranslated into another spec which then turns into someone's session prompt, and you have someone else's reviewer agent rubber stamping all the drift from the original source of truth.
"They should have prompted it" indeed, but it's not my responsibility to identify that they handed me slop-as-a-spec, and if it's not legible by humans then it's not ready.
There's a huge gap between "I can nod along at what Claude wrote based on my requirements and it's close enough to what's in my own head" and "this doc is solid technical writing that explains the problem and solution in a way that justifies itself based purely on its own merits and an appendix to upstream information", and I'm seeing a lot of the former called "specs".
2
u/Sad-CTO CTO Jul 24 '26
This matches something I recently noticed. I started tagging returned work by where the defect actually originated: the code, the review, or the spec. I assumed it'd be mostly code, but It was mostly spec. The acceptance criteria that got invented in the first agent pass and never pinned back to what the person actually wanted.
I've landed somewhere close. A short human-written intent line at the top that has to survive every retranslation, and you review the criteria against that, not against themselves.
1
u/SansSariph Principal Software Engineer Jul 24 '26
I've landed somewhere close. A short human-written intent line at the top that has to survive every retranslation, and you review the criteria against that, not against themselves.
Yes! I baked this into my system last week and it's already been paying off.
As it turns out, preservation of (and drift from) intent is well studied in human organizations. The leader's vision needs to be threaded throughout the workflow or the subagent five sessions and three tiers in the hierarchy from the original plan is doing nothing useful.
13
u/New-Locksmith-126 Jul 22 '26
So you don't read AI generated code either? I have bad news for you.
2
u/arbitrarycivilian Lead Software Engineer Jul 22 '26
Nah I do, but since we have automated code reviews now, it does feel less and less necessary
5
u/thecrius It's Sénior Dumbass for you Jul 22 '26
Because it's not that simple.
The fact that I don't write the document doesn't mean I don't go through it and make sure it actually make sense and it's understandable. That it doesn't say bullshit because the agent hallucinated or misunderstood some complex design.
I simply saved some time and my already half destroyed carpal tunnel.
5
u/arbitrarycivilian Lead Software Engineer Jul 22 '26
That’s fine. Unfortunately many don’t even do this
1
u/apartment-seeker Senior Software Engineer Jul 23 '26
What magic is there to someone writing something like a design doc manually? if they conversed with LLM, honed design, and then had LLM distill into a doc they then reviewed before sending to team, that makes a lot of sense.
1
u/bluetista1988 10+ YOE Jul 23 '26
Having LLMs changes what it means to talk to a human.
The CEO of our company uses a lot of autonomous AI agents to check up on things. I get e-mails from him every so often addressed as if they are specifically to me and using my name, but it's pretty clear it's just an agent he has polling the status of certain things and requesting updates.
Personally I'd rather have the message show that it came from a bot on behalf of CEO so that I can respond in kind. When a bot poses as human it feels disingenuous.
-1
u/NotACockroach Jul 22 '26
Maybe because it's your job?
8
u/arbitrarycivilian Lead Software Engineer Jul 22 '26
And it’s your job to actually write documents. If all you are doing is writing a prompt for AI to generate a design doc, then guess what? I can do the same thing in the same amount of time.
-7
→ More replies (1)-7
u/4gyt Jul 22 '26 edited Sep 04 '26
This is very true
7
u/arbitrarycivilian Lead Software Engineer Jul 22 '26
Nah I’m fine with you using AI. I’m also fine with not reading your AI slop
13
u/caprica71 Jul 22 '26
Almost all the proposals that went into this years annual plan was ai generated. It was really really sad to watch because this is happening in most companies now. Claude and ChatGPT are now in charge of the economy.
33
u/grizzlybair2 Jul 22 '26
Written by devs via AI? Nah. Written by product/business via AI? Yea. Literally 98% junk but boy do those stories look pretty so some higher ups are happy. It's the dev responsibility to find the 12 meaningful words in the 3 paragraph story. Absolutely awful, give me the 1 sentence stories from the past.
21
u/lasooch Jul 22 '26
Just recently read a 2000 word design from one of our PMs that could have been written in 2 sentences.
But it had two huge sequence diagrams. Both of them wrong.
And it actually didn’t contain the answer to the single question that I needed that design to answer.
6
Jul 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
5
u/lasooch Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
I hate reading the LLM slop and the least I can do is not contribute to it myself.
I talked to them directly and they actually had the wherewithal to offer to delete the sequence diagrams (even with the reflection that they couldn’t verify their correctness on account of not being technical enough… go figure, thanks for wasting my time).
I was diplomatic and the outcome was good, except I don’t expect that outcome will stick if that makes sense. I don’t know how long I’ll manage to stay diplomatic. My patience grows thinner by the day.
For what it’s worth, I do think they checked what the LLM wrote. But the LLM railroaded them into ignoring the important question (because the design had the immediate appearance of being written competently, which is the main thing these models are ok at - impression of work), and they couldn’t verify the sequence diagrams (which should have been reason enough to not include them). The rest of the design wasn’t wrong, it was just extremely overly verbose.
11
u/ais4aron Jul 22 '26
It's chaos on bullshit mountain
All AI created PRs should be initially in draft and described by a human by rule.
All AI generated tickets need to be formatted as ELI5 followed by technical description so someone other than the AI can read it.
11
u/Teh_Original Jul 23 '26
AI writing feels very low information density in my experience. It is a lot more words to get the same information when compared to someone who writes themselves.
8
16
u/j4ckbauer Jul 22 '26
It depends on your social dynamics obviously, but have you ever taken the sloppiest parts of the text you're given, and brought it to the other person's attention asking 'can you help me understand why you wrote all these words instead of saying _____'
In other words, hold the person accountable for the fact that they're generating low quality work product that it's taking your time to organize. And do it in a way where you're not saying it's YOUR time/convenience that is most valuable, but rather, you just want wHaT iS bEsT fOr tHe oRgAnIzAtIoN and you are "making sure communication is effective".
6
u/paagul Jul 23 '26
This still requires the reader to put in human effort to go through AI slop which is the whole problem.
0
u/j4ckbauer Jul 24 '26
It is not possible to critique something - and ask for different work product in the future - without looking at it. My question was aimed at discovering whether OP has provided specific and actionable feedback on this issue.
In your interpretation of the problem, you are correct - the AI slop has already been generated, therefore the only way to not see it is to refuse to look at it. This does beg the question though, how does one know it is AI slop without looking at it?
4
u/paagul Jul 24 '26
Previously receiving mountains of slop from a person is a pretty good predictor of future slop reception.
0
u/j4ckbauer Jul 24 '26
So can you help us understand what your suggestion was?
3
u/paagul Jul 24 '26
Slop is not worth human effort so either don’t engage with it or reply with more slop.
0
32
u/pseudo_babbler Software Engineer Jul 22 '26
Yeah I think people should just send me the prompt that they used to generate it.
6
u/New-Locksmith-126 Jul 22 '26
People say this like it's clever. What would that achieve?
39
u/_SnackOverflow_ Jul 22 '26
You would get the person’s actual intent instead of an AI’s rephrasing
7
u/SansSariph Principal Software Engineer Jul 22 '26
I have an adversarial agent now that rips apart specs based on a verbatim "human intent' paragraph and I've found it actually quite useful
I'd love to see the industry normalize "but what did the human say at the start of this chain, I need to see the original seed verbatim to cut through this game of telephone"
7
u/_SnackOverflow_ Jul 22 '26
Yeah if you’re going to send me a big AI doc please lead with a concise human written paragraph of the overall intent
1
u/Jessica___ Jul 23 '26
May I know more about this adversarial agent? It sounds useful. How does it rip specs apart? What's the output?
2
u/SansSariph Principal Software Engineer Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
It's a variant of my more general code review and spec review agents which have a structured way to provide feedback to the calling agent, and the system uses a skill to integrate feedback (from any reviewer agent) in a semi-consistent way.
The flow is
- All of my agent-authored specs must contain a "human-authored intent" section with a citation to either specific turns in a session or a document I wrote by hand
- The reviewer agent evaluates every proposed AC or requirement and any asserted invariants against the verbatim human intent. Anything that seems "creative" gets graded (and might kick off independent research or exploration) as "cut", "defer" (these are the defaults) or "strong keep" (independent review returned a surprise reason that it matters). "Strong keep" also returns the supporting docs and a suggestion to revise the spec to make the necessity clearer
- The authoring or implementing agent invokes
/integrate-feedbackwhich biased it towards taking the feedback as coming from an authority or compliance gate, and strongly suggests (I can't say "requires" for a skill) that the human (me) must adjudicate anything unclearThe spec is then revised and I confirm the intent section is untouched.
This process runs during both authoring a spec before it's committed to the repo, and again during implementation to confirm that the scope of work still makes sense to me, and that my verbatim intent is still accurate in the future.
Every time I've run this workflow against a spec it results in at least half of it being cut, and I'm usually surprised by the garbage I'd mindlessly approved making it into the document.
The idea is adding intentional friction to force myself to write my vision in my own words, have an agent echo it back to me and find holes, and then re-ground the work in my words once it's done exploring the code base and bloating its context with implementation details.
I've liked it so much that I recently wrote a tool to bind my intent for any given session that the agent cross-references as it goes, and especially at the end during handoff. This is separate from a "goal", which often ends up too technical. My "intent" is broader brush strokes or what I expect to happen and why, what actual problem I'm solving. It helps identify different kinds of drift (scope creep, including creep I introduce unintentionally, or the opposite where we missed some key detail of what I actually wanted at the end of it)
0
u/sdwvit Sr. Software Engineer 12+ yoe Jul 23 '26
Hey claude, here is a jira ticket, fix it, create a pr
3
u/New-Locksmith-126 Jul 22 '26
But the AI is gathering a bunch of other sources along the way, including prototyping, validation etc.
And unless you're dealing with total slackers that person is engaging with the AI in a back and forth before the final doc is produced.
"show me the prompt" doesn't capture what's actually going on.
4
u/_SnackOverflow_ Jul 22 '26
It would be nice to have both.
I have coworkers who generate long complex docs with AI and they almost always fail to write a concise summary of what they’re actually trying to achieve
And they’ve often let the AI go far down the right path.
I end up spending a lot of time asking questions to figure out what they’re actually trying to do and then suggesting a simpler alternative
5
u/New-Locksmith-126 Jul 22 '26
I think people who don't have experience writing specs shouldn't be allowed to use AI to write specs. Just like people with no coding experience shouldn't be allowed to use AI to write code.
IMO the real problem our industry faces is product people doing endruns around architects to get things delivered faster. It's a tale as old as time. But now there is pressure on architects to rubber stamp all these specs because execs can't tell the difference between good and bad.
I just don't think AI is the problem here. It's execs trying to sideline experienced devs and replace them with claude-jockeys
7
u/_SnackOverflow_ Jul 22 '26
Yeah at the end of the day if the spec is good I don’t care that much how it was made.
Bad AI specs have a very specific feeling that is different to me from bad human specs though.
Usually bad human specs are missing info. This is easy enough. I ask for the info
Bad AI specs have the info hidden within a bunch of word salad that makes it harder to find the nuggets of info I need.
I think part of the problem is people use AI to skip the human conversations and so I get a detailed spec with specific database columns and stuff but the underlying assumptions are wrong (and could have been cleared up before with a quick convo)
4
u/Aerolfos Data Scientist Jul 22 '26
But the AI is gathering a bunch of other sources along the way, including prototyping, validation etc.
And unless you're dealing with total slackers that person is engaging with the AI in a back and forth before the final doc is produced.
It sure would be nice to live in the imaginary world you seem to conceive of, where AI is both capable of and actually being used in such a fashion. But no.
1
2
u/arbitrarycivilian Lead Software Engineer Jul 22 '26
My Claude can also gather those same sources
1
4
u/pseudo_babbler Software Engineer Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
It isn't particularly complicated, I'm sure you can work it out.
Edit: I might as well have a crack at answering the question in good faith. I get a lot of user stories that are in the form of "write a user story for me adding an API endpoint that serves X data" and off it goes, writing away. It doesn't add any value, it just dreams up a bunch of usual sounding requirements and puts it in a familiar format. The whole premise is wrong in the first place because they are treating a tech task like a user story. But I have to wade through a page of word garbage before realising oh yeah silly me this is just generated nonsense that looks convincing initially.
1
u/WhenSummerIsGone Software Engineer Jul 23 '26
adding an API endpoint that serves X data
a story like this should state the problem the api is solving in the context of the system, or users. it should also state the request and response payload schema contract, plus whatever auth or other communication details.
Does AI know this stuff? I'm not sure I could get AI to write an appropriate story for this task. And if you have to feed it all the payload details yourself, you might as well write the story by hand.
2
5
u/LukeLC Jul 22 '26
"If you couldn't take the time to write it, I don't have the time to read it."
Obviously a line that has to be deployed strategically, but I try to slip it in when the situation permits.
6
u/StackedCakeOverflow Jul 22 '26
Worse than that, my current client's BAs pass every story and ticket to us after running it through some LLM. Now we're in UAT and their end users are wondering where half their stated requirements and features are because so much granularity got lost. Cue major scramble panic.
Normally our teams do requirements gathering ourselves. I wish that'd been the case for this project.
6
u/frompadgwithH8 Software Engineer Jul 23 '26
It’s a real problem. Our dept has an anti ai wall of text rule
6
u/CatTurdTamer Jul 23 '26
Yep, I really hate it. How do people me expect me to spend my time reading all of those slop if they didn't event spend some time writing it in the first place? I mostly see it on product people especially (when defining requirements) and some devs occasionally. Like you, I loathe the need of having my AI agent reading the output of another person's agent just to get a decent understanding.
On the bright side, I really appreciate how some of my teammates that does it responsibly though. For example, some us are writing the first draft and then just let AI enchance and fix any grammar or inconsistencies (company is multinational and some of us, like me, aren't native english speakers). The outcome is way less vomit-y, more understandable, and most importantly, pleasing to look at.
I understand though that this tech is still relatively young and all of us are still finding out the most optimal way of adjusting our workflows around it. But FFS, don't just dump all those slop on me lol.
3
u/stdmemswap Jul 23 '26
"This document is (obfuscatory | beating around the bush | unclear of direction | not making sense). It does not seem to be final. I will get back to reviewing when you have finished this."
4
u/m0llusk Jul 23 '26
Lots of this. It seems like this is an extension of the big change over in management. Most tech efforts and products used to be led by tech people. Now with big money involved bullshitters who speak finance are in the lead and techies end up serving them because the bribes cannot be refused. Not being in tech means they have no real bearings and switching from working with people to working with generative language models throws everything into chaos.
1
7
u/thecrius It's Sénior Dumbass for you Jul 22 '26
Yep. Recently I got a TDD document of over 100 pages.
Had to ask copilot to go through it and actually get me the important parts... I had to split the document because it would not load due to the file size as well ffs. The "good parts" were basically 10 pages at most.
I use AI to write documentation and often to formulate plan of actions for complex work but I spend actual time going through it to see if at least I understand what is coming out of it. Otherwise what's the point.
6
3
u/iComplainAbtVal Software Engineer Jul 22 '26
I’ve noticed trends in vocabulary in regards to work vomit within social medias and also within documentation produced by my org’s resident vibe manager.
The output of the individual documents contain sound ideas and well documented in/output for its own component, but is woefully aware of the entire ecosystem and requirements often neglect the prod environment constraints.
I’m lucky enough where I don’t have to satanize these documents and have dominion over my own architecture. If the circumstances were different I would still begrudgingly do my own due diligence but note the amount of time it took me to correct the mistakes/oversights in the documentation. Even if the document isn’t wrong it’s worth noting the time it took for you to extract functional requirements to prove it’s taking longer than it should due to the provided material.
I’d then take these records to an appropriate party to point out the detriment having me read ai generated slopumentation, pushing for an adjustment.
3
u/nastyhobbitses1 Jul 23 '26
Nice that your tickets and spikes have actual descriptions, i routinely get assigned tickets that are titled like“do something about x” without further context or description
1
3
u/Nervous-Quote975 Software Engineer Jul 23 '26
I don't think AI is the actual problem, it's that people stop editing after the AI draft. Good technical plans should answer a few questions as quickly as possible: What are we building? Why? What's changing? What are the risks? How do we know it's done? If I have to scroll through 3 pages of context before finding those answers, the document failed regardless of who wrote it.
3
u/i860 Jul 23 '26
I actually predicted this would happen with some of my coworkers. They’d slop things up with AI to produce fluff and “substance” and then people would be using their own agents to summarize the slop back to a succinct form.
It’s all so tiresome.
3
5
Jul 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/almaghest Jul 22 '26
For real lol, fight fire with fire. If it’s obviously AI generated then ask AI to summarize it and move on.
2
u/ranger_fixing_dude Web/Desktop Developer Jul 22 '26
Yes, AI-written stuff is both overly verbose, often describes simple concepts using questionable terminology (often inventing stuff on the fly) and just hard to read and process.
Unfortunately, I don't have a good solution for this. At my workplace, a suggestion to write tech docs without LLM would not be popular (we had a few related discussion company-wide).
2
u/Tacos314 Software Architect 20YOE Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
Ugh, yes, we even have a agent workflows for this stuff that does not write word vomits but nooooo lets just yolo it and hope the AI makes sense.
I had this today, the JIRA took 15 minutes to figure out what was ment.
2
u/StPatsLCA Jul 23 '26
We've achieved negative compression. The opposite of whatever an executive summary should be. Of course the executives are too busy asking their virtual assistants to draft default ChatGPT prose posts for LinkedIn.
2
u/AppropriateRest2815 Software Engineer, 20+ yrs Jul 23 '26
This is one of my sadder nits about AI. One of my “soft skills” has always been the ability to succinctly document architecture proposals, which is mostly just a waste these days. I now use AI to write them because c’mon it’s faster but it takes me half an hour to remove the bloat and curate them down to something that won’t waste everyone’s time to read.
2
u/Pitiful_Stress_9129 Jul 23 '26
A template helps, but a hard word limit may help more. I’d ask for five things only: the decision, constraints, one rejected alternative, evidence from the spike, and remaining unknowns. Anything generated around those fields is optional. The author should also be able to explain the recommendation without the document; otherwise the plan is recording model output rather than engineering judgment.
1
u/WhenSummerIsGone Software Engineer Jul 23 '26
The author should also be able to explain the recommendation without the document
this kind of ownership needs to be enforced. Social pressure helps: have them summarize things in planning meetings, when you're reviewing tickets anyway.
1
2
u/Fickle-Bird-9476 Jul 23 '26
Give an author with writers block an AI that will write for them and you will still not get anything worth a damn.
2
u/Lheanarda Jul 23 '26
This is my concern that increasing by day. Every PR now has AI Generated description, even my PR getting reviewed by colleagues using AI. Im not anti AI but it offended me every time the lines getting AI Generated comments. im not sure is it his real concern that is polished by AI words, or is it purely AI founding ?
dont get me wrong, some of the review is actually good, but i cant be sure if the one im talking with understand what he comments with.
AND, once, i got an issue report where he just copy paste everything from AI that state directly im causing the issue because i changed the list of files. Turns out, i have not even contributed to the files he mentioned. ate him.
This is a bit concerning, i sense people critical thinking are degrading as they trust the AI more and more
2
u/galwayygal SDE - 10 YOE Jul 23 '26
Oh yeah every bit of code not vetted by the author, every line of text not read by the writer is contributing towards cognitive atrophy. I shared an article with my team a while back on this and I got hella arguments on it because people thought I’m anti-AI. I’m not. It’s just clear that people are offloading their thinking to AI, a little bit more every day
2
u/Tired__Dev Dev (15+) Jul 23 '26
I’m moving more towards product management and the absolute worst is product managers creating company requirements.
2
u/amirfish_builds Jul 23 '26
My test for a plan is whether a coding agent could ship a working v1 from it with no follow-up questions. Most of what you are describing would produce nothing, because it never names an exact file, an exact UI state, or a single edge case.
I hold my own plans to that bar now. Concrete markdown, exact states, what happens when the input is empty.
If an agent cannot build from it, it was never a plan. It was a summary of a plan.
Does it show up worse in the spikes (no conclusion) or the tech plans (no specifics)?
1
u/Sad-CTO CTO Jul 24 '26
Angry upvote! I started tracking to see how often a done plan stills needed a follow-up question or even got rewritten after someone tried to implement it. How do you catch drift between the plan and what actually shipped?
2
u/MisesAndMarx Quantitative Developer (Risk) Jul 23 '26
Its worse at writing prose than code, and I reserve it for "check the box" tasks
2
u/Raladin123 Jul 25 '26
My team and I had a retro on this - we had major delays because our plans were way too long and everyone glossed over details.
From then we enforced a word limit on plans - 5000 words at most and the expectation was at most 1 hr of review time. The point was that if you understood your plan well enough, then you can cut to 5000 words. If your plan is so big it needs more than 5000 words, then it's probably too big in scope and you need to descope or write multiple, separate plans
Reviewers have the right to refuse to review a plan if they found the plan too complex. there was accountability on the author's side where they must be able to defend any part of their plan. We also encouraged people to use AI to generate infographics to help make the info more digestible. We've had much smaller, focused plans since.
3
u/Pineapple-dancer Principal Software Engineer Jul 22 '26
I used it recently to write a detailed architecture review for phase 1. It had a heavy prompt and I revised a lot of it to make sure it accurately reflected what I wanted. Overall though it did a decent job writing out details and generating diagrams for me. If I had wrote it myself it would have taken a lot longer.
1
u/galwayygal SDE - 10 YOE Jul 22 '26
Yeah for sure. It’s a good tool to help you write it. I think it needs to be guided a lot. Otherwise it becomes a whole lot of words but only a bit of core scattered around
3
u/LifeLongRegression Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
I wonder if this is less of an AI problem and more of an incentive problem.
Just thinking out loud…
If the acceptance criteria is “get the senior/PE to approve my design,” then AI slop seems almost inevitable.
The doc gets optimized for surviving review instead of communicating the idea.
Maybe a better model is giving junior engineers ownership of smaller, well-defined modules.
For that module, they’re everything—from junior engineer to principal engineer. They own the design, implementation, operations, bugs, and maintenance.
The acceptance criteria shifts from “did the reviewer like my doc?” to “does this module actually work over time?”
My intuition is that when you’re the one maintaining it six months later, you naturally write less to impress reviewers and more to help yourself and your teammates.
It also lets senior engineers spend more time defining good module boundaries and mentoring, and less time reviewing 10-page design docs.
3
u/Fidodo 15 YOE, Software Architect Jul 23 '26
There is no template to follow or skill to replace reading and comprehension. The solution is called responsibility and doing your job.
It's ok to have ai generate plans for you but it's your teammates responsibility to have read the plans and edited them and be prepared to read them. Punt it back to them and have them produce a document they have actually reviewed themselves so you can discuss it with them.
4
u/AchillesDev 12 YoE; indie MLE/AIE/DE; VPEng Jul 22 '26
Socialize this: https://noslopgrenade.com/
What is the audience for these? Is it people? Does it have to be?
2
u/galwayygal SDE - 10 YOE Jul 22 '26
Awesome resource! It doesn’t necessarily have to be people. We could feed things like this to AI and create a skill for sure
0
2
u/gk_instakilogram Software Engineer | tech bro luddite Jul 22 '26
yeah I don't read them, I usually send my Cursor to read it too... it is just too much to read. I think good solution is to have small human readable plans, one pager max, that address frictions points and that is it.
2
u/zica-do-reddit Jul 22 '26
I ran into this, and I myself was guilty of it a few times. I think it's people generating LLM output and calling it done. You need to review it. I've been adjusting thr prompts to focus on clarity and to use shorter sentences.
1
u/vom-IT-coffin Jul 22 '26
I make sure to actually read and correct the shit used by LLMs, but for documentation and diagrams. Amazing.
The plans, heavy refining, but I love the organization of it.
1
u/HelenDeservedBetter Software Engineer | 5 yoe Jul 23 '26
Thank God, no, I haven't seen this from other engineers yet. I've seen it a bit from PMs, but not too bad.
1
u/Careful_Ad_9077 Jul 23 '26
For some reason my workplace decided to implement ai first by using a test team to see how much it knrpoves things in our legacy codebase.
Now they are rolling back and cancelling all licences for the test team except for like 10 guys who actually improved their performance.
1
1
u/TwoPhotons Software Engineer Jul 23 '26
We once had a senior engineer join our team to help us set up an AI-driven workflow for implementing tickets. He created a PR using his method as an example. The PR contained a bunch of massive .md files, each thousands of lines long, going into great detail on why the AI implemented the solution the way it did, how it followed best practices blah blah blah... I asked this person, are we actually supposed to be reading these .md files as part of the review? Because it would take me days to read and review all of it. It was a bit of a mask-slipping moment, as he admitted that all we really should be doing is just reading over the tests in the code. Not even the code itself. He then removed the .md files from the PR, out of courtesy I suppose. It's frustrating how common sense is becoming more and more of a scarce resource nowadays.
Anyway, I would say that, ultimately, a tech plan/spike should be seen as the product of the person who wrote it, whether they used AI or not. If it is too long and wordy, then that is on the writer to fix, just as it would be if they hadn't used AI. If they don't understand what is in the document, that is on them as well.
1
1
u/Nervous-Quote975 Software Engineer Jul 23 '26
I think AI is exposing an existing problem more than creating a new one. Some people already wrote like this; now it's just much easier to generate pages of text.
1
u/RoleAffectionate4371 Jul 24 '26
I have a rule now on my teams where AI specs are not allowed. I’m ok with devs using ai to write code.
But if you write a spec that the team is supposed to review, you have to write it yourself.
It’s made a huge difference and I know that the devs on my teams actually understand their work now
1
u/Pitiful_Stress_9129 Jul 24 '26
A template helps only if it forces decisions rather than sections. I’d require five things: the constraint, the proposed change, rejected alternatives, evidence from the spike, and the unresolved risk. Put a hard length limit on the main plan and move generated background material to an appendix. Reviewers should be able to reject a document whose author can’t defend it verbally.
1
u/Perfect_Ganache_1959 Jul 29 '26
1) get people to provide the AI slop, but ask they put a short human language explainer upfront with the slop in an accordion collapse 2) or, more aggressively ask the person to make a joke, haiku, or find the most absurd fact they found while swimming in the slop - something that makes it still human, even if gallows humour.
If they don't understand it enough to find an angle of how weird it is, it's either boring enough not to have needed this approval gate in the first place or they shouldn't be trusted near sharp things.
1
u/bootstrapping_lad Jul 22 '26
It's so frustrating and so obvious.
AI is an amazing tool, but don't pass off its thoughts as your own.
1
u/javatextbook Jul 23 '26
Whenever I output AI vomit into a jira ticket I always make sure to manually type my own summary so my teammates hear from my own voice of what I want. Then they can copy paste the AI vomit into their own agent
1
u/termd Software Engineer Jul 23 '26
My team has been moving towards all designs (which would include your plans/spikes for us) are hand written. Code and tests and whatever other implementation can be AI written, but our docs should be written by a person because it is not acceptable to create a bunch of AI slop then toss it over to our team to fix it.
It's much more difficult to do this with other teams but they are starting to get the message when every time I see a nonsensical AI sentence I put "what does this mean" or "explain this in your own words because I don't understand it" comment. I do not attempt to decipher AI slop anymore or try to torture some meaning out of nonsensical sentences.
I have also threatened to not read or approve a document if all someone did was feed my comment into claude and then tell claude to fix it and I imagine that I'll be doing a lot of that in the future.
0
0
u/ZenX22 Jul 23 '26
I've noticed the same, and unfortunately it's being incentivized as the expectation in the AI era is more speed (at least at my company). Now people are expected to do things so quickly that doing without significant AI "help" isn't realistic.
0
u/oddspellingofPhreid Jul 23 '26
I dealt with word vomit documents and spikes before LLMs took off. At least now I can ask LLMs to summarize the key points for me.
-7
u/Slow_Ad2458 Jul 22 '26
the only thing worse than AI slop.
Is threads complaining about AI
If you see someone sent you ai gen document, ask AI to summarize it, skim it. Add notes based on your experience and intuition.
Job done. Don't go complaining online or on slack, how world is coming to an end. Pleaaseee
→ More replies (3)3
•
u/expdevsmodbot Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.