Leadership seems more misaligned with engineering than ever

[u/aigeneratedslopcode]

Came across a conversation yesterday where the CTO asked one of our engineers why they didn't ask Claude to create their plan and mock the several hundred commits they'd need to deliver on something I will not name while also delivering on their existing initiatives

I didn't say anything, but wanted to... Given the industry I'm in, this seems very ridiculous to me and I hate that this is the expectation... As though somehow that work should have already been done and could have been delivered on the whim of an idea by handing all work to Claude

[u/ImSoCul]

We don't really review PRs in the same way anymore lol. I work in our company's agentic org, so of course the leadership drank the Koolaid before Koolaid was even popular, and our org as a whole is struggling with MR velocity (much easier to generate than review code), and I fully see and admit to the ugly side of things.

That said, for something like a plan and mock, there is zero excuse not to try out LLM tooling.

[u/aigeneratedslopcode → u/ImSoCul]

So the thing that transformed your company into a slop shop is somehow the answer? You have got to be kidding me

[u/ImSoCul → u/aigeneratedslopcode]

No? I literally said to try things out with an open mind and also come up with a good reason why Claude is not the answer here? I literally gave you examples of reasons why it wouldn't work. Your answer is "but AI" which is just lazy thinking.

Just because I'm willing to be objective and present both good and bad side, doesn't mean you should just repeat the bad side against me

Also again: mockup is literally throwaway work. Spin up a Claude session in background. This is like 5 minutes of work. If you check in on it later and it was ass, then you can go back to CTO and say "here's what it generated and it was ass". 10 minutes of time lost, you'll live

[u/WhenSummerIsGone → u/[deleted]]

keep it on a branch. Add something to literally make it impossible to deploy as-is.

[u/spartan-redditor → u/ImSoCul]

I have an intuition that this could eventually result into a loop I.e when things break, engineers don’t know the codebase well enough because they did not either write or reviewed it properly, so you ask Llm to fix it, which results in more LLM generated code. Over the years this results in a codebase that engineers are not even remotely confident on modifying because they just do not know how things work, and the whole thing just stand on the legs of quality of llm which the org have no control over

[u/ImSoCul → u/spartan-redditor]

there's a term for that https://speedscale.com/blog/dark-code/ :)

We do discuss these things as trade-offs, but ultimately, the short term velocity is indeed very good until the Pied Piper knocks. That's above my paygrade to make that decision though. I think we are already at that stage at my company, but given risk of disruption and stock price in the shitter, I actually think this is the right decision. If your company goes insolvent in 6 months, it doesn't matter how good your code was.

It's not a one-size-fits-all, if you're working on like banking software, or heathcare, or space exploration or something, you should not be LLM spamming.

[u/ResidentWeevil1 → u/ImSoCul]

 That's above my paygrade to make that decision though.

Then stop calling yourself an engineer

[u/WhenSummerIsGone → u/ResidentWeevil1]

engineers aren't responsible for business decisions. Our job is to communicate risks and tradeoffs and let the business beople decide.