why not just approve the PRs with little more than a cursory glance?
One of two things will happen:
1. Things start breaking, proving AI generated code sucks and the individual spamming these PRs is incompetent.
2. The code works fine and reviews are unnecessary for anything other than liability concerns.
Some of us actually take the "engineering" in "software engineering" seriously.
That includes taking responsibility and accountability so that the software doesn't become a sad and dangerous mess.
If we want to be an engineering discipline, just yoloing in production is not going to cut it.
This no longer works when bad faith actors will push code straight from LLMs with little review, and respond to your comments with LLM responses. They will constantly leave you with the responsibility of verifying the output. You are the human in their loop. This is a brutal asymmetry. In the past, at least you knew a person probably spent more time handwriting code than you will spend reviewing it. This no longer applies, now the reviewer can easily spend more time than the author.
Oh but it does.
The thing that makes it scale is to default to "no" and require the other party to convince you of "yes". Just put the burden of proof where it belongs. If they don't manage, then that's their problem.
Communicating this in a way that is viable for a business scenario certainly comes with its own difficulties, but that is a solvable problem.
In fact, you can use AI to stress test your communication there. Just throw what you want to say at the AI but don't tell it that it is you who wrote it. Then tune the input until it stops saying that you're the problem and starts agreeing with you.
Highly recommend. It's a perfect emotion-driven cargo-culting normie simulator that never calls HR on you.
Did you not read what I said, they will use LLMs to spam proof onto the human reviewer. Just endless replies with LLM generated answers until you yield and approve the PR.
Because we're all on call for the service, and tragedy of the commons exists. That coworker isn't paying the cost, everyone else is paying a fraction of it, and it builds over time.