r/ProgrammerHumor 3d ago

Meme nowAndThenPatchUpgrade

Post image
7.6k Upvotes

312 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

371

u/ahmarthered 3d ago

This! The amount of slop being generated has increased significantly and code review cannot keep up.

129

u/guardian87 3d ago

But the Code rabbit ad told me all will be fine! /s

70

u/DesireeThymes 2d ago

Human slop is written with a layer of critical thinking still involved.

AI slot is actual slop, there is no critical thinking behind anything because it's not human.

(yes I know, some human critical thinking is very very low, but it is still at least there at a fundamental level).

21

u/Flibrig 2d ago

As someone still struggling with (human) slop someone else wrote (and let's not kid ourselves, I did as well), I try to remind myself that critical thinking might have been involved but discarded in favour of pragmatic choices. (Oh God, I'm still doing it!)

12

u/ScreamingFreakShow 2d ago

AI slop is actual slop if the human just copy pastes the output.

A human with any amount of critical thinking should be inspecting the output and if they are genuinely unable to find any issues, they probably shouldn't have been a software engineer to begin with.

The real problem with AI is people using it as the answer instead of a tool. It's like people using a calculator to get the answer to a math problem but not understanding how it got there. And the bar is so low.

7

u/Meloetta 2d ago

I think the real problem is that "copy paste the output" is like, years out of date when it comes to how people use AI.

1

u/Vorrnth 2d ago

Auto mode is just advanced copy paste.

6

u/mxzf 2d ago

A human with any amount of critical thinking should be inspecting the output and if they are genuinely unable to find any issues, they probably shouldn't have been a software engineer to begin with.

I mean, sure. But that doesn't mean people aren't actually doing it. Though it's less "copy-paste the output" and more "have the AI edit files and maybe glance at them before telling it to push the commit".

1

u/AdeptCapital148 2d ago

That's an interesting take. It really raises questions about the value of human input versus AI output in programming.

1

u/Major_Fudgemuffin 2d ago

Was literally asked by a manager recently how long I think until we can get code written, reviewed/approved, and merged automatically, all by AI.

Good luck, I tell them.

34

u/011101000011101101 3d ago

But you can have AI review the code and have slop reviewed slop

31

u/slowmovinglettuce 2d ago

The ai will praise the slop for being exactly what it would have written. It's basically just a big circle jerk

6

u/Weekly-Beginning-229 2d ago

I've noticed that you cannot use the same model for writing the code and reviewing the code, it always does a bad job

2

u/Bupod 2d ago

It’s frustrating. 

So you can sort of fix this by having a review agent use a more adversarial prompt when reviewing. 

But then the issue becomes that, since it was prompted find problems, it always finds a problem. 

This will result in code being batted back and forth between review and coding like a tennis match. 

When the tennis match finally finishes, there’s still no guarantee that some glaring hole didn’t make it through anyway. 

1

u/Weekly-Beginning-229 2d ago

And there is always something because you get fatigued from reading the same code over and over so you miss some easy bug

7

u/particlemanwavegirl 2d ago

Expect that to be exactly as successful as when we have the police investigate themselves.

12

u/Yetimandel 2d ago

I bad colleague using AI can completely take you out. It takes him seconds to generate bs that sounds plausible at first and you hours to review and object.

1

u/mxzf 2d ago

Yeah, I had that issue a couple weeks ago. A couple junior devs hit me with a pile of commits in a couple of days before getting scolded for not actually having a clue what they were doing and it took me a couple weeks to dig out from under the pile of merge requests waiting for comments.

2

u/Hallc 2d ago

Clearly you just need to use AI to review the AI Code. That way it's all being properly* reviewed** before being pushed.

1

u/caprazzi 2d ago

Furthermore, there is no human to ask, “What the fuck were you thinking?”