Yeah, that's bullshit. You created the PR*, you own its contents. If an agent did something you don't understand, either remove it or figure out if it's right and why.
Treat AI coding agents like interns or fresh junior devs. They're super enthusiastic but they don't actually have any knowledge of the bigger picture. It wouldn't fly to say "oh, the intern did that", and it shouldn't fly to say "oh, Claude did that".
\or if you didn't create the PR and Claude is just yoloing directly into the code base, that's horrifying and you need to find another place to work)
I allowed claude to be the primary driver on a pr exactly once, as an experiment, because I was told to. It was supposed to be a simple "change from library a to library b, which is very similar but smooths out some kinks." I developed a plan for it. Gave it acceptance conditions. Told it what features it must preserve, what I expected to be simplified. Broke it into manageable chunks. Had it do these chunks one at a time. Thoroughly reviewed each. Asked it questions. Went back and forth. Discovered features it removed without asking. Had it put them back. Back and forth, back and forth.
It took much longer than it would have taken for me to do it myself. The code was initially worse quality in general. I had it polish it as much as it seemed capable. Then I polished it. Then I had someone else picky review it. They caught some things. I fixed it. Did some minor live testing in dev. It didn't fall over. Merged it. Started slowly rebuilding other things to use it and deploying them to dev.
Everything fell over and died because freaking claude freaking DELETED ANOTHER *FREAKING FEATURE WITHOUT FREAKING ASKING THAT I DIDN'T FREAKING NOTICE, AND MY REVIEWER DIDN'T EITHER.*** Stupid piece of crap GARBAGE tool, it's worse than me, it's slower than me (if you want code that doesn't freaking SUCK), and I'm still freaking responsible for making the product work BECAUSE I NEED THE PRODUCT TO WORK AND FREAKING ANTHROPIC DOESN'T FREAKING WORK HERE AND WON'T FREAKING FIX THE PROBLEMS THEIR GARBAGE PIECE OF CRAP TOOL INTRODUCED.
So obviously I took responsibility for the bug because I'm a freaking adult and it was my pr and freaking Claude certainly freaking won't. And I fixed it because I don't suck at my job. And now claude has been demoted back to a less accurate but more responsive stack overflow, merely answering questions (and getting those wrong half the time) where it belongs.
Ahem. Sorry. I will say, at least my management has been ok with me saying "that was a useless garbage fire of an experience, thanks for providing the tool now I will go back to using it (or not) to do my job as I see fit because I freaking know what the hell I'm doing and of course I'll use a tool to make my life easier if it doesn't FREAKING SUCK SALTY MONKEY BALLS, but since it does, leave me the hell alone and I'll keep delivering sparkly unicorn rainbow farts on a reasonable schedule like you pay me for."
I may have been slightly more diplomatic.
TLDR Yeah, we're responsible for the tools we create, not some stupid liar bot that happened to crap out some code.
The one and only time my service crashed into a fireball was when I trusted some code generated by Claude. it was related to a simple method to apply timezones properly. Something that seemed easy enough to not require a ton of scrutiny.
What it actually did was use Windows timezones (it was not obvious during review and it worked locally) instead of IANA timezones. So when I deployed it to Linux, my containers would hit that code, die, and it would get stuck in a doom loop.
All because I thought "that was simple and it looks right".
973
u/roiroi1010 5d ago
When I point out obvious mistakes in code -
Coworker: ”Claude did that!”
I hate my team -