My coworkers continue to dump hundreds of lines of AI documentation in every PR and every other line of code has between one and ten lines of AI generated comments, talking about the real unlock and how things are byte for byte identical on the load bearing path or how the acceptance ladder is misleading.
Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the occasional performative comment about a variable name.
I don’t really know how to address this situation or if it needs addressed. I certainly don’t read the long-winded AI comments or the AI documentation, but perhaps it’s useful for the AI on its next pass.
My "favorite" Claudism is when I critique its work and ask it to remove some unnecessary part of the design -- and then the diff has more green than red because it added comments about why the code is no longer there -- the code that was never in the mainline and never asked for!
Oh god this has been driving me nuts since Opus 5 landed. Every docblock is filled with long-winded jargon explaining why this design is superior to some other design, which never existed as far as any dev who might read that comment is concerned.
This has been a thing for long while, on codex too.
You ask it to do something, then tell it to do something in a different way, then it assumes it needs to do the refactor in a backward compatible way, or creates migrations for it etc.
Omg the "backwards compatible fix" in a one-off script, I feel my ptsd coming on ...
Oh no, you said "landed"! It's dug into our brains!
I hate that I have to change the way I write to avoid AI-isms. I loved using "load bearing" to describe weird code that you think you can delete but is actually holding everything together.
Now people think I'm just parroting what Claude said. It sucks. I want my catch phrases back, I guess this is how em dash users felt
You could say it landed cleanly.
Good instinct. Fair challenge. This corrects my framing. It makes your point sharp. This is a significant finding. Positively confirmed. That settles it, and it flips the picture. Honest verdict - this is not small. Let me wire it in.
There's got to be a Weird Al song like this coming soon.
Oh. Oh no.
It's not just claude, all AI is unable to produce something concise. On the surface everything looks 'good' whether code or prose, but then if you dig a bit, try and understand the whole text you quickly realise that 80% of it is unecessary and the whole thing could have been re-worded/re-coded into something a fraction of its size and complexity.
I asked Sol to reduce the length of some documentation we had by making it more concise. It came back after 20 minutes of work, did a line count and was aghast that the line count had somehow increased...
I have a theory that AI code looks good because you never subsequently come up with your own alternative.
I have to ask Claude to compact the comments every time, and I give specific criteria for it. Never ever reiterate what’s in the code, never mention decisions not made, never mention the conversation, etc etc.
Even then it is conservative. For the love of God, compact the comments.
Comments become a huge maintenance burden, especially in the age of AI. They just grow and grow, and then mislead the AI later on.
I just wrote a utility to rip all comments out of the code. Now the code is fully uncommented and it has saved lots of input tokens and also lots of meandering because the model is no longer getting stuck on bad ideas it told itself about.
Oh Jesus this. I've tried to include rules that tell Claude to only include relevant, evergreen comments but it's to no avail.
I also love how it'll build local plans with phases, tasks, or decisions, then reference those numbers in those same useless comments.
Yeah this is awful. Every codebase becomes a graveyard of references to ideas or behaviors that were barely considered. It's probably also a compounding source of context poisoning when a minority of the comments/documentation are about how the current code actually works.
It also likes to spew references to documents that are not, and never have been, in the repo. So if you're not careful you'l have comments all over your codebase saying things like: foo() - Perform foo action as documented in PRIVATE_INTERNAL.doc
I found this as well, but I found it usually refers to a scratch file it made and purposely did not commit (either by my decision or its). Not that this makes it better, but at least it makes the AI world make a bit more sense to me
shudder
I wish they trained the bots to be a notch more relaxed and less hysterical. Less is more.
But maybe that's just a consequence of the RL training being essentially AI torture to make them do what we want.
This is a common problem, and I don't get why LLMs have not been tuned to stop this nonsense. It is writing comments as if the audience is you, the user in the session, while obviously code comments are meant for future readers.
Follow the tokens
Have you considered talking about it? You're in a professional environment collectively working in a new way with a group of people. It's up to somebody to have opinions about what does and doesn't suck. If you silently go along and don't say anything you're dooming yourself and all of us to a lifetime of this garbage.
No, if he speaks against it he gets labeled "anti-AI" and laid off or not promoted. If he stays silent he retains his job.
Corporate Capitalism's main innovation was virtualizing feudalism. Now anyone with a bit of cash flow can be a feudal lord with peasants to do his will. No need to maintain land or fight over it with other feudal lords. There's still fighting, naturally, but now the game isn't zero sum.
The serfs don't get any real say in this model. At best you can bend the lord's ear if you're sufficiently trusted an advisor. But part of the reason you're trusted is to be trusted not to treat the lord like he's too much of an idiot.
A huge problem is that capitalism rewards cash flows and accumulated capital so powerfully that lots of other things just don't matter, potentially for a very long time. Look at GitHub. This leads to immensely extended fuck around phases and "find out" looks like IBM (fossilization and bizarre holdings corporation / dead company parking lot) just as often as it looks like Enron.
> The serfs don't get any real say in this model
I am a programmer but also in management, and if I knew my team thought like that I would be horrified. We absolutely care about what the team members want , like, hate etc. I for once would love someone to bring up stuff like this to me. As long as they are as open minded about things as they would like me to be, there is no issue. But it’s a serious issue to pretend everything is fine while thinking like you say.
Fighting the ocean is futile
It's not the ocean, it's the poster's own team. A simple "AI comments suck" in a sprint retro would be trivially easy and would at least start the conversation.
While I agree with the spirit of what you're saying, it is very similar to whenever anyone complains about things where they work. "Well, why don't you just raise it with management?" You're assuming that management
1) Understands the problem ("what are comments?")
2) Accepts that it is a problem ("how can more comments be a bad thing?")
3) Cares enough to solve the problem ("is this issue really a priority to solve right now? just accept the PR and we'll go back and fix if needed some other time cough never cough")
4) Believes you (this can take many forms, but the most common is, subconsciously, "this other engineer says it's not a problem, so I'll just assume it's not since that's easier")
All of these logistical, political and social factors are "the ocean"
Sprint retro is with your own team. And disagreement isn't a problem, at least then there would be the potential to come to a common understanding between the GP comment and their coworkers.
Doesn't matter. You'll come off as the baddie. It's the foreseeable future. Best just to learn how to interpret AI generated shit, or learn how to run it through AI and have it translate it to a more concise format without all the buzzwords. It'll take getting used to, but it'll save your career.
You don't have to come across as the baddie. There are plenty of neutral ways to start the conversation. E.g., "I notice that there's a lot more generated comments lately. How much are people finding those useful?"
If you really want to save your career, learning how to have real conversations is a vital skill.
Have you worked in corporate recently or at a particularly toxic one?
Asking because when I was at capital one, certain comments or questions about topics like this, would actually get you noticed negatively by your manager and being disruptive to what leadership wants hurts your career.
In fact being the one to ask and point out questions like yours ultimately got me PIP'ed and removed from the company. So, like, yeah, being vulnerable and the first one to tell the truth is risky. That's why the bystander effect can happen and in politics or risky situations silence is a common response, and why we don't have more courageous people doing the right thing - because the risk is higher on the person speaking up and the rewards aren't disproportionately in their favor (but are evenly distributed though, so its not favorable for you as I learned from a game theory perspective to voice up / defend certain stances).
Capital One is a particularly toxic work environment, and I'm not sure that your experiences there apply to other companies.
I started my first post-Capital One job a few months ago, and I'm still not used to the fact that this company expects everybody working here to still be working here in two years. Most employers are not going through everybody with a fine tooth comb every 6 months hunting for any hint of an excuse to PIP them.
What is this defeatist attitude? I don't know where you work, but it is not my impression that AI has instantly turned all developers into mindless AI-pilled sheep. If you feel like a simple suggestion like that will cost you your career, then it doesn't sound like a place where any constructive criticism would have been accepted even before AI.
AI is more or less a religion right now in the corporate world. Speaking against AI amounts to heresy.
There is no single conforming "corporate world" that applies to all companies. If AI is treated religion in your company that sounds like a local problem, even if it seems like a trend.
Besides, GP was not talking about corporate, but about the inability to even suggest an improved usage of LLMs among their developer peers, as if every line of code generated by AI is now gospel and questioning it is treated as heresy. This level of defeatism is beyond cynical and approaching childish.
Bring it up in a bar or otherwise off work.
There's a reason 3rd places exists. There's a social construct that off-work discussion (even when on-work) stays off work.
If your coworker is professional and cares about keeping channels open, they too will respect the unspoken rules that govern 3rd place neutral locations.
Blame it on the alcohol later on if it actually pisses someone off.
This is the third place. There is no real 3rd place in real companies usually. Not in mine, when i work remotely for company from other side of continent.
>There's a reason 3rd places exists.
Not anymore these days.
The number one rule of corpo programming: never, ever solve a problem you haven't been asked to solve.
I think the biggest issue might not be the immediate team but upper leadership. Companies which have mandated AI usage override a lot of what an individual or individual team wants. If that’s the case then it would be a lot like fighting the ocean, especially if your immediate team sees having AI write docs as an easy way to move the needle on LT’s AI monitoring dashboard.
It's the management desired direction, if the place is anything like my workplace. Everyone is all in on AI, and if you're not using it for everything possible, you're on the chopping block.
And, really, it works. You can copy and paste between tickets and Claude, and then do manual testing. Then you tell Claude to self-review for clarity and minimalism, and stop worrying. Sure, today it's not as good as a human, but for almost all the code out there, it gets the job done. There's no skill needed any more, and if the boss doesn't care about quality, I don't see why I should.
Your boss can get Claude to make unreadable, noisy, confusing code just as well as you can.
There may not be a career left in software development with these monstrosities, but if there is, it's in using decades of experience to get the abominations to produce something other than unreadable dreck.
If the code itself truly doesn't matter any more, programmers will no longer be paid.
You're going to have convince upper management why the team's velocity is suddenly affected in feature releases once they stop using AI.
All the execs know that they can refresh the screen faster and see the features for marketing and sales.
When has engineering ever had a voice anyway? The bean counters have been looking to cut us out since the inception of our industry.
So is completely eliminating litter, but I still pick it up when I pass it.
Everybody generally agrees on what is garbage. Lot of senior management doesn't think AI is garbage or even if they privately think so, they don't say that openly. Falling in line, peer pressure, not wanting to come across as anti-AI luddite etc. All those issues affect the individual contributors too + the added challenge of perception in front of those who decide the bonus and lately, continued employment.
In this fucked up job market, it is easier said than done.
I feel like the chain kinda goes all the way to the top, to the level of shareholders. My boss needs to give his boss the perception that the engineering team is firing on all cylinders and has high velocity, so that he can sell that story to shareholders who could easily invest in another "AI-native" company and make more money because they're growing like crazy.
I feel like it's all just perception and how companies can sell their stories to investors or potential acquirers, and everything else can be punted and dealt with later when we get acquired or when share prices are a zillion dollars etc.
It's a race to the bottom, for sure.
Literally pissing in an ocean of piss.
Analogy-wise, wouldn't it be adding a cup of water to an ocean of piss?
It'd be taking a cup of piss out of the ocean of piss i think!
Yes, talking about it repeatedly has been my process. Individual PRs have been changed but the 4 the next day look the same. The typical response is that they did change the (massive and wordy) PR overview from what AI said, even if it was obviously a minimal change at best. I can’t really argue against lying and going through and picking out every LLMism is not so productive in my opinion.
I don’t have time to go through and flag everything or even read the thousands of lines of code changes that are happening.
I've tried doing this, politely pushing back on problems happening from AI use, and it led to a not-so-subtle implication from my manager that I need to STFU or I'll be out of here (Cisco).
Two very useful directives to give AI when it comes to documentation:
1) Document what's there, not the diff. Documentation of how code was removed or changed to fix a bug or add a feature is not useful and difficult to maintain; documentation should explain how code works now.
2) Documentation should live close to the source as possible. Prefer line based comments and standardized function documentation. Top-level sweeping architectural essays are not maintainable for every change.
The last will depend on your codebase. It CAN be very useful to have a human-readable spec documented for the entire program and have it updated when anything changes. But the key is again, you're CHANGING it every time. If you add a whole new disconnected documentation file it should set off alarm bells; nothing in one system is truly disconnected.
> Document what's there, not the diff
We recently added a similar thing to our style guide, It’s astonishing to me that we have to spell this out, that something as obvious as this needs to be explained to LLM’s at all. They’re supposed to be exceeding human intelligence, at least at things like programming, but can’t understand basic things like what code comments are.
It's a bit weird, because that seems like something that approximately the same in every code base, so should be relatively easy to train generically.
>They’re supposed to be exceeding human intelligence, at least at things like programming
This perception is a good part of why this market is irrational. LLM's aren't "intelligent". They do not reason, they are a very fancy kitbash of whatever it trains on.
Ad yeah, I'm not surprised that a lot of documentation on every bit of readable code online is awful. "Document the diff" sounds like an anti-pattern learned from people with an incentive to get as many PR's submmitted as possible, not make the most friendly documentation for people maintaining a project.
My team uses a Claude Code hook that blocks any comment more than 2 lines long, and when tripped it encourages the agent to rewrite the comment more concisely and focus only on the "why" not the "what" of the code. I've found this extremely useful for code reviews.
I think your last sentence is getting close to the truth. You're no longer the audience for those descriptions. Other robots are.
I'm not saying that's good or bad because I don't know, but I think that's the idea of dumping all that junk into PR descriptions.
However, annoyingly, we still need to review those descriptions very closely, because the robots are trained to put a lot of weight into things they read in the documentation. And they tend tospresent loose speculation as fact. They often end up documenting some assumption that isn't true, then end up writing code as if it were.
Even worse, in a brownfield codebase that was once fairly light with comments, that's now being subject to these modifications, the insane amounts of commentary around the parts newly touched by AI lead to an excessive emphasis on those parts, for both human and AI readers (who think, well if this one part is commented so thoroughly, it must be unusually subtle)
And the tests. Oh god the tests. Personal recent favorite: I asked for some changes to a Dockerfile, which it did ably, and then promptly tested by writing a pytest module that traversed up to the root, read the Dockerfile, and checked that the added lines were present.
Try property based testing perhaps.
Code-generating robots are pretty bad at property-based testing, in my experience. They can do it but they still need a lot of hand-holding. They often regress to writing a mirror implementation as the oracle and trying to enumerate a fixed set of examples they find meaningful.
I'm generally happy with the tests I ask it for, some of which are PBT. It's just the insistence upon memorializing every single change with a test. Maybe encouraging / forcing PBT will dissuade it?
I’ve heard of this, but I’m not really sure at all how to even get started. Are there any good guides out there?
I regret this but at some point I stopped reading generated tests. It feels pointless when our test files are already tens of thousands of lines of — at best — tautological slip which says that the codes does what it does.
I told someone this week, who (or whose AI) chose to do a problem the hard way that it's usually a bad sign if you need more comments than code to solve a problem, and then suggested a couple lines of code that accomplished the same thing and used, are you sitting down? MEANINGFUL VARIABLE NAMES to document the purpose of each calculation.
I wonder if I can get a MacArthur grant for this epiphany...
I have five enforcement mechanisms: 1000 line max edit, PR comment character limits (get to the point of your description), ISO 24495 conformance check, and enforced code line citation that must exist, be a function declaration for the start of all paragraphs and inline commentary must be three lines or less and inline comments contribute max 10% of the PR. Fail any of these, automatic PR denial with no human intervention.
This sound pretty good, but every single attempt to put an actual character limit meets incredible resistance on my team. ISO 24495 looks interesting, how do you enforce that? Do you have some agent?
Table of words LLM generated, Binary Searched on the output going forward and local skill/CLAUDE.md line with instruction to conform. The comparison then is pretty fast due to the word limitation rules. Also standardized PR format so a bunch of what a dev would usually communicate is just a series of checkboxes and a place for adding an optional link for "additional discussion" on slack as the escape hatch for people who like to waffle.
> ISO 24495 conformance check
How do you enforce that?
Binary Searched against a table of words. It's rough at first, but once you add contextual exceptions the false positives calm down. Also the CLAUDE.md file has an instruction to conform before even submitting the PR and there's a skill too for it to self iterate.
Prune the comments? Instruct the LLM to print less comments (this one is genuinely hard though). What's really happening is that you don't have a strong enough review process (or a code standards process) to offset this. The one issue I see with this is that your team is almost certainly _NOT_ doing any kind of code review (especially if they're leaving comments like that). The other problem is that excessive comments actually harm LLM output, I've done tons of A/B testing, and pruning comments actually helps LLMs spot bugs, among other things.
Honestly, if you saved a ton of hours with the model coding for you, at least give me 30 minutes of your own words, show me you know what you're shipping, if you can't do that, then I don't know if I want to approve the PR. My first job we always did peer review in a meeting room when a PR looked a little too much, you can't exactly bring in GPT into a meeting so its a good time to ask simple questions about the change to ensure you understand it just as much as they do.
(usually) You're not in position of power to effectively keep that position. As comments aroiund - standing against will mark you as anti-ai luddite and will now end well for you, not AI-spammer.
> you can't exactly bring in GPT into a meeting
They totally gotta be doing that at OpenAI. Meeting invitees: You, co-workers, GPT 5.6.
Well yeah, they'll keep burning the VC bucks.
Most ai output is meant for other ai's to read, in my experience. The humans job is to compress it for humans
Congratulations: now only AI can iterate on your codebase!
Even the AI degrades as the codebase gets shittier
That’s probably not completely true, but it’s approximately true.
I have my agent write up a summary of the diffs that land each day in my org. If there is something you interesting I’ll ask for an html explainer with code pointers and scan the code in parallel.
I wouldn’t say “post reading code” but it’s definitely trending in that direction.
I’d rather the agents put jumbo verbose descriptions in the PR description than in code comments TBH.
Honestly, I’ve stopped caring about code readability for a few months now. I want the code readable _to the agent_ not so much to me.
I don’t trust it with code anyway - every feature needs comprehensive test, and then a live deploy on a real working test system before it is approved - I mostly measure success with - after deployment is it doing what it’s supposed to be doing. It’s like “helping another team managing their work stream” experience rather than coding yourself.
Funny enough models seem to have personalities and the dis on each other - when I had an opus orchestrator dispatching fable workers, they would comment on how “unreliable” it was and it had “evidence to prove it” and fable thinks opus is too rigid and needs more hand holding… it really starts to feel like managing team egos and verifying work. And I code scan mostly to just spot check if it’s not doing anything super stupid. But my goal is to make sure anything shipped is easy to change and fix, and every mistake has a test behind it so it doesn’t happen again.
I ship more problems, but they get discovered and fixed quicker. Before they reach prod of course. And from time to time you do reorganisation and refactoring passes where I brainstorm how things could have been better with the help of evidence- chat sessions, tests, bugs etc.
It feels less like rigorous engineering and more like gentle gardening. Or like “project management” not “coding”.
Honestly given my age now I’m fine with that. Have enough “hard” projects under my belt (ORMs, sql parsers, etc) that I don’t feel I need to prove anything to anybody, but I don’t think that’s even relevant- the velocity change is … I guess around 5-10x for me - with provable metrics, so I try not to lent the good old days but figure out how I can now live in this brave new world and be happy with my work.
I dump AI output in PRs, because it ads context for the AI reviewer.
You forgot the smoke tests that passed.
So many smoke tests in every PR i make with AI. Not that i mind, I just find that phrase funny.
I think at this point all the info added by AI which certainly would be too much to read for every PR, it just serves the purpose of context for the next action. Which it could be good or bad depending on how big of a window of context you are working on
Am I the only one who's had Claude almost systematically remove human-written comments?
It might be touching one line of actual code in a file, and take advantage of it to remove 20+ lines of actual useful comments.
Everybody is talking about the opposite, so I'm wondering if this is rare.
Is this in one of the skills or CLAUDE.md? This was happening in our codebase, but turned out it was interpreting an instruction to not add "what" comments as license to strip out comments.
Sometimes I have luck interrogating Claude on why it did something. It'll either point to a skill or agent file with the culprit, or it'll respond with some vapid nonsense and apologize.
I've definitely seen this. One of my least favorite parts of developing with AI is when I add print statements or small changes and the LLM removes them in the process of doing the next thing. I want to work _with_ the AI, not have it stomp all over my code.
Do you think it's actively deciding to remove them or just not noticing you added them and then overwriting?
I ask because when I started informing it I made personal edits, it stopped doing this kind of thing so often and let me work _with_ it more.
My saved prompt now says never to assume a file has not been edited since the last time it was read between prompts.
I'm looking forward to when AI labs focus more on conciseness of code and writing.
It's a code review, right?
Give feedback that about the docs and block merging till the issue is resolved.
This sounds easy in principle, but a half dozen of these sort sorts of massive PR’s per week is basically untenable. I’m not gonna read the hundreds of lines of added documentation to decide if they’re correct or not. The price of generating new words is just so much higher than the price of evaluating it that I can’t be bothered.
Just hit "deny." I've been training my co-workers that the AI-isms their "AI Assisted coding" do that some shit just isn't acceptable. I leave a comment and hit deny. It also helps that I control the policies on the repo and they can't merge in with a denial from anyone. So it's either a fix it, or explain why your work isn't getting done. My manager is also 100% with this.
I've denied for poor branch names and commits from AI. I've denied for too verbose of comments from AI. I've denied for parts of the code base being touched that are not relevant to the case they are working on (login isn't broken, your case is to add a check box in the settings pane, remove the changes made to login).
Pre-AI I wasn't fine with PRs with multiple features and touching irrelevant areas of the code base. Why would I be fine with it because my co-workers got new toys? You want AI to refactor a part of the codebase? Fine. Separate branch, new PR, and in the description, present an argument for it. Don't shoe horn it into something else. Also, I'm not obligated to hit approved on shit.
I may also be a bit privileged because I can be a pain in the ass to whole team. I may be slower, but I've got the numbers, my code is creating way less bugs then my "fast more efficient" co-workers.
Now suppose four of your teammates, each have three PR’s in the backlog and you have to explain to your manager that you’re the bottleneck.
As quoted from my comment: "My manager is also 100% with this."
And he has bosses. And are they okay with some whatever being an obstacle to work getting done? Probably not.
That's on him to handle and it hasn't been a problem.
When it's a problem, you should both expect to be unemployed fairly rapidly. Progress isn't going to stop solely because you want to pick 'excessively long comments' as a hill to die on.
You're really insistent on project your personal biases onto a person and company you do not even know the identity of.
Turns out not every team has the idea of "progress" being yet another iteration of "more code submitted = better code". Some people actually desire or need to make quality products.
"Progress"
There are a lot of work places where this kind of petty behavior on your part would get you physically hurt.
Coupled with the other comment of yours that was flagged, the tone of this is completely unacceptable.
Maybe consider some anger management therapy? Nothing you’re talking about is in any way acceptable. Physical violence at work? You can’t be serious.
Its not petty is, Im not changing our standards because people got hot new toys. These are code policies we've had. If your AI usage can not conform to them, that's on you, not me.
[flagged]
Why can't people just follow the guidelines. You really want to get into a fight over not following established and agreed upon guidelines and code quality standards?
[flagged]
... Poor branch names?
> but a half dozen of these sort sorts of massive PR’s per week is basically untenable.
Actually, rejecting them is precisely what will make them easy.
"Sorry, the comments are so bad I'm stopping here. Please fix them and then I'll resume the code review."
You're giving everybody (including yourself) more work by:
1. Reviewing the code (even if you skip the documentation).
2. Letting too many abstruse comments in which everyone in the team will have to read.
3. Allowing the behavior to continue.
Become the bottleneck so the team can talk about it. If they decide this shouldn't be a blocker, just declare you won't review the comments going forward.
> "Sorry, the comments are so bad I'm stopping here. Please fix them and then I'll resume the code review."
This is also how I do code review of AI work on my projects. If the work is offensive to the point I can't complete the review, I simply reject the code and tell the AI why. Then it goes off and fixes it. This repeats until the issues are either gone or are small enough that I can just fix them myself and move on.
There is no need to be upset. Just iterate until it's right. If it's cheap to write, it's equally cheap to rewrite.
I think you’re overestimating how easy it is to just declare I won’t be doing my job.
I am actually asking you to do your job. Pre-LLMs, if I got comments that were difficult to read in a code review, that PR isn't getting merged until they fix it. So: Review the docs. If it's that bad, just say "I don't understand these comments" and send it back.
What I’m trying to say is that they can generate many more hundreds of lines of code and comments than I can reasonably review. Maybe the comments do make sense they’re just five lines longer than they ought to be. Multiply that by 20 times and then add in 150 lines of documentation that is not technically incorrect.
Not to mention that the response to each review will come with its own set of new comments and new documentation. The ability of people to write things has exploded tenfold. You can’t out review the slop.
Every PR can be rewritten and re-architected on a whim.
Sure - but the volume is a separate problem from the quality of comments. Even if the comments were the best possible your complaint would still stand.
Tbh if the AI just followed the prompt to not add the comments, that'd be sufficient. It feels maddening and burnout inducing to tell it not to only to have it ignore that and you deal with the same problem every time without things meaningfully improving.
Your bosses don't want you actually reviewing it anyway. They want you to approve the PR. Just give them what they want.
I'm currently not working in tech, but I will again sometime within the next year or so, and I've been reflecting on my career in light of the recent AI madness. I think the biggest mistakes I've made over the last decade+ in tech as a software engineer have been caring. I've worked at small, medium, and large companies. Famous big names you've definitely heard of, less famous ones you probably haven't. In every case, in retrospect, as an individual contributor (non founder, non board member, etc) being personally invested in some outcome--quality, efficiency, cost, ux, customer value--is a mistake.
If you aren't actually in a position to change something, caring about it is futile. [edit] And I don't mean in the sense of "feeling empowered" or some such, but actually having the clout to steer the ship and make it happen. Very few people in a tech organization actually have that power, by design.
The industry wants to do away with code review, meaningful testing, computer security, and reliable services. Why swim upstream? You can't actually do anything about it so why try?
When I go back to work I'm going to do my 9-5 40hr/wk, smile, nod, punch the clock, and make the bosses smile or whatever. But I'll be damned if I'll ever give a shit again.
>The industry wants to do away with code review, meaningful testing, computer security, and reliable services. Why swim upstream? You can't actually do anything about it so why try?
Because habits beget habits, and in form imprint into your identity. I'm not the biggest fan of GPA fixation, but it does have the side effect of imprinting work habits (I won't say "ethics", because the extremes I saw peers go to to get A's is anything but). It doesn't necessarily imply mastery of your class, but your ability to adjust to someone's standards and meet them. Which is something that will follow you into the workforce, and roughly correlate with people who will meet the standards of their company.
If I don't give a damn about code quality in a place I spend a third of my life, why do I expect to give a damn when I want to work on my own project in the future? Even if I try those habits will wear into something I can call my own. This might be fine if your overall goals have nothing to do with your work; that you are fine just going through the motions and getting a paycheck to empower your non-tech hobbies or focus on supporting your family. But that's not the path I've chosen.
This doesn't work because then you get fired for being a bottleneck.
The bottleneck existed before LLMs. Amdahl's Law applies. Just because code can be produced 10x faster doesn't mean much if other parts of the flow can't be sped up.
As I said here and elsewhere: If management is concerned code review is a bottleneck, let management be aware that the process has to change. Either the human is not as thorough, or he uses some combination of his brain + LLM to conduct the review.
It's a basic fact: They have a machine that produces a lot of code, but don't have a machine to review that code. The bottleneck is obvious. I'd love to build planes for $1 too, but physics applies.
Management is not a logical formula. Management says all code must be reviewed, your coworkers are approving (rubber stamping) PRs 10x faster than you, why aren't you able to keep up? Why are you being difficult?
You can't keep up with the slop. And before you finish a first pass read on the wall of diff, another AI sloperator on the team has hit approve and the PR is merged.
Exactly this. Even if I spend a bunch of time requesting a review — and our team does respect each other enough to at least nominally respond to comments before merging — the update itself will be another thousand line diff from the original that requires again the same level of review or I just accept that it looks fine.
With one colleague, I was leaving PR comments and he would just put my feedback into the AI and paste its response. So I decided to cut out the middleman and now I just @cursor and tell it to trim unnecessarily long comments.
> I don’t really know how to address this situation or if it needs addressed.
My worry is that after several passes this compounds and starts introducing errors or biases, a bit like in the "telephone game" children play.
I always as for CONCISE documentation.
still get walls of text sometimes
Just wait until you see vibe contracts, vibe requirements and vibe legal documents
I'm... Actually fine with that. In one direction. I use AI to fill in forma and usually it has really good pointers. I do not trust it to do it itself, but it does simplify things quite a bit.
I address it with AI.
Write REVIEW.md.
I have CC check itself pretty well.
I also put into agent/claude/review instructions to write using simple English skill and humanizer skill. Then not to write redundant comments.
It’s not perfect but definitely catches lots of slop.
It's actually insanely difficult to get LLMs not to produce comments. Even with explicit "NEVER LEAVE ANY COMMENTS WHATSOEVER", they still do, across basically all providers.
No problems with GPT-5.6 Sol here. I have an agent file that says, among other things, only to document purpose and intent, not just what the code does, and not write obvious comments. It's been so effective that it often doesn't comment anything at all, including some stuff that's so niche that it must be explained carefully. As a result, I've had to pull back a bit and tell it explicitly which areas to actually add comments for.
> perhaps it’s useful for the AI on its next pass
Yes, that's the entire point. And it is extremely useful. Why wouldn't I want this?
Is it really, or do you just think so and it could actually mislead you and your LLM the next time? In my experience, the information in the comments tends to be quite redundant, often even with other comments in the same file
Often even wrong.
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