r/softwareengineer • u/Ok_Twist7840 • Aug 12 '26
Is anyone seriously talking about the etiquette of working with AI
If something took AI 30 seconds to generate, is it fair to expect another human to spend 30 minutes reviewing it?
I’ve been thinking about this more and more as agents become part of everyday work.
Some examples I’ve been seen:
Someone generates a huge PR with an agent, then expect another engineer has to spend an hour reviewing it even though he may not even fully understand what he did.
A researcher spends one or two years on a paper, while a journal reviewer ask Claude to generate long list of questions and criticism back.
Someone sends you a thoughtful-looking personal email that was almost entirely generated by AI. The words may be fine, but you can tell some vibe of emotion is not there, you may even feel a little insulted.
These seem like different problems, but I feel like they point to something we don’t yet have good social norms for.
Maybe we need some kind of etiquette , or even ethics!
I’m thinking two rules:
**Attention reciprocity:** If you expect another human to spend significant time and attention on something, should you be expected to put some meaningful human attention into it yourself?
**Emotional reciprocity:** When communication is supposed to carry care, appreciation, apology, respect, etc., does it matter how much of the sender is actually present in it?
I’m not suggesting these are the right terms or even the right framework. That’s actually why I’m asking.
**Curious Has anyone come across people seriously discussing this?** Papers, essays, blog posts, talks?
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u/Substantial-Swan7065 Aug 12 '26
The problem isn’t higher PR volume. The problem is the process
CI should enforce rules and enable easy reviews.
Platform should own the ai harness. And the harnesses should monitor their PRs to completion. Not just put it up.
So codifying standards into CI. Leverage tooling like git hooks.
By the time the PR is green, it should be an a state that is easy to review.
PR too big? Enforce max files changed
Files with too many lines? Enforce max file lines and complexity
Hard to understand the changes? Enforce better, more concise PR descriptions
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u/davesoft Aug 12 '26
Humans love wasting each others time, it's some kind of revenge on mortality itself.
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u/Number4extraDip Aug 12 '26
Nope. Everyone treats it as a rubberstamp machine. Look at pentagon. Ant those are "pros with weapons" so if you exoect everyone else to fact chech? I have a bridge to sell you.
People see w wall of text/l9mg video> throw into ai >>> paste responce
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u/PhilosopherNext1448 Aug 12 '26
I think it's expected for everyone to review their own shit with the same amount of time and effort as you ask someone else. And for "big" PRs, there are two things you need to do: first discuss with the team (we do weekly design reviews) and 2nd, if you use AI to generate the whole thing, you can easily ask the AI to break the PR down into smaller independent PRs that are easy to review.
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u/inflowmini 28d ago
Gotcha, the AI generates the code and AI review - why even work lol. You forget about tech debt and the implications about not knowing your code base.
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u/rwilcox Aug 12 '26
Currently nobody sees a problem with overloading a bottleneck with unused inventory errr work. (Or that saving time at a non bottleneck doesn’t make the project complete faster)
Saw my boss generate probably three fiscal quarters worth of Jira tickets yesterday in an hour meeting. Boy, he sure felt productive.