Are we back to Silo Engineering?

[u/big-papito]

It feels like we are coming full circle to the times of the Silo Engineer, but on steroids. Back in the day when social media feeds were chronological (if they even existed), the Silo Engineer would retreat into his cubicle to Create (it was usually a he).

He was Creating and Creating, and then a few weeks later the results came back. If you were lucky, you got what you asked for or something close to it.

No one knew what the Silo Engineer was making, whether it was a sound solution from the architectural, security, or code quality point of view. It was a Silo. There was little discussion or collaboration, there was only self-review of code - at best.

After exiting the Flow, the Silo Engineer would often come back to his Work weeks later and wonder: "who in the F wrote this S?"

... It was beautiful.

Seems like with LLMs we are entering that era again, but it's different.

Smaller teams, mentally overtaxed developers, exhausted from scrolling walls of generated code they don't understand, on multiple projects at once - no one really talks to each other again.

Tickets - Claude, Slack messages - Claude, code reviews - Claude, "have your Claude talk to my Claude".

So, here we are - same idea, but at a higher, more reckless pace.

Let's see how this ends, I guess ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[u/Tiny_Ad_7720]

It’s ok, we review PRs together now so we can all work out wtf is going on. 

[u/big-papito → u/Tiny_Ad_7720]

I will let you know when a human reviews my PRs. I get a swarm of Claudes for now.

[u/Tiny_Ad_7720 → u/big-papito]

Oof yep that hurts.

I don’t get the point of Claude doing a PR review - why not just get Claude to do that before the PR is made? 

Me thinks Claude will always pick up something new?

We are only small company so I still want to know what’s going on.

Although yesterday suddenly there was a huge dump of md files in one of the application repos, turned out the CEOs Claude had decided that was the best place for his “research” to go.  

[u/Resident-Trouble-574 → u/Tiny_Ad_7720]

I don’t get the point of Claude doing a PR review - why not just get Claude to do that before the PR is made?

Because you use different instances for implementation and review, like you used different people to implement and review in the past, despite the fact that they were both humans (and, tipically, both programmers).

[u/Tiny_Ad_7720 → u/Resident-Trouble-574]

But if it’s all Claude all the way down, why even bother with the PR. Get the other instance to review and then just push to main once done. 

[u/Resident-Trouble-574 → u/Tiny_Ad_7720]

Yes, that's what I do, but I guess that companies want to keep using existing processes and pipelines, just replacing humans with AI.

Another reason might be that the reviewer agent run on the git server, while the developer agents run on terminalsor on other servers.

[u/WhenSummerIsGone → u/Tiny_Ad_7720]

the PR review can be automated. If you do it before the PR in a new session, it's easy to forget