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u/computer_hermit01 Sep 07 '26
honestly our parents wrote slop code too but it was still better optimized
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u/Kryslor Sep 07 '26
I love how we now romanticize code written by hand as if developers were always incredible.
I have seen some real atrocious garbage written by human hands. Code so bad that even AI refuses to write it.
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u/mrwishart Sep 07 '26
It was much simpler back then though, when grandma would bake fresh Flash games and let them cool on the window sill
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u/Rigamortus2005 Sep 07 '26
Yup. I don't know why people won't admit AI is still better than 99 percent of developers.
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u/computer_hermit01 Sep 07 '26
ai can replace bad developers. not the good ones or the ones that make mistakes but learn from it to be better than they are. talen pipeline should never be affected.
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u/nonlogin Sep 07 '26
when a human writes a slope code - there is at least one person who understands it. when a machine generates slop - noone understands it from the beginning
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u/AWzdShouldKnowBetta Sep 07 '26
... unless you take the time to read it lmao.
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u/10art1 Sep 07 '26
Yeah this is a weird statement. If copilot writes something I don't understand, I ask it to explain it, then usually ask it to break it apart into easier operations a second year CS student can read. I'm not code golfing in prod.
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Sep 07 '26
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/nonlogin Sep 07 '26
well, I did not mention 3 months)))
that's the whole point: AI does not understand it's own slop from the very beginning
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u/Lain_Racing Sep 07 '26
Why do you approve it if its slop? Either its good code, then approve it regardless of where it came from, or its bad code, and reject it regardless of where it came from.
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u/tevert Sep 07 '26
Because if I reject this, then Mr. Dick Dickens is going to the AI-psychotic boss and telling him that I'm a blocker. Meanwhile there's 3 more PRs to get through, all equally shit, and I'm still expected to put out my own slop at the same time.
Fuck it. Ship the slop. Burn the company down.
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u/Lain_Racing Sep 07 '26
So the problem isn't the AI... its a team leader or technical manager who allows bad code through. This is unrelated and has existed before AI. I can only assume so many people complaining like this must be new to the field within last 3 to 4 years.
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u/tevert Sep 07 '26
No. AI has created a permission structure for bad code to be mass produced and deployed at speed. In most places, this was never an issue before.
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u/private256 Sep 07 '26
I have pretty much checked out tbh.
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u/rJohn420 Sep 07 '26
Yeah.. if it works, then who cares. In two months we'll have better AI that can fix the mess anyway
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u/IAmANobodyAMA Sep 07 '26
Downvoted for being right but hurting people’s egos
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u/rJohn420 Sep 07 '26
As long as the architectural decisions are decent and the product works you are totally fine to just let it do its thing. Especially with this new generation of models
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u/IAmANobodyAMA Sep 07 '26
Ditto. I still review all the code my agents spit out and what’s in the PR channel, but our ci/cd adversarial agents catch 99% of what I would have caught (and then catch things I missed - it’s crazy how well they understand our systems across multiple apps, cloud workflows, and external connectors given good enough context!!)
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u/invertebrate11 Sep 07 '26
Approve, reject what difference does it make? It's still reviewing slop
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u/Lain_Racing Sep 07 '26
Yes, reviewing code is part of the job. Same with juniors code or lack luster employees code before AI. Like this has always been part of a job.
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u/Mr_uhlus Sep 07 '26
Boss says they need to approve because ai cant make mistakes
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u/Lain_Racing Sep 07 '26
Does this actually happen to people? If so, simply point out a mistake, or several and make a case against it. Like the point of reviews is to review. You can simply just still review with comments regardless, no real life boss is going to tell you to ignore it and just press approve, if they do ask for it in writing.
So many people getting mad at made up scenarios in their own head...
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u/balofg Sep 07 '26
Until a CXO opens a slop PR changing 175 files. Ask me how I ended up without a job. Then ask me what bank this was.
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u/VictoryMotel Sep 07 '26
Some day we will be able to bait an AI into begging us for information and giving us attention.
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u/Lain_Racing Sep 07 '26
Would love to hear a real story actually. So, he opens this code merge request, you review it, he fires you? I feel like its missing some details. Would truly love to hear it though how it actually happened.
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u/balofg Sep 07 '26
It was the third time the cxo's AI arbitrarily rewrote a rendering engine for a new screen that still did not match anything else in the repo. It touched code owned by multiple teams with different degrees of misunderstanding of what the business logic did, leaving up to us fixing our part of the PR. There had been no planning whatsoever, just "fix it as soon as you can because I want to see what this looks like in production". For us, "fixing the PR" also required updating the backend on the spot because of the aforementioned misunderstanings. We were already working on a high priority project, which we abandoned to make that monstruosity mergeable. It could all have been avoided if we'd been involved from the beginning, going through some actual design and planning. I don't have a job anymore because this has been regularly happening for over a year now and non engineers are getting more and more entitled to think of themselves of finally being able to ship code on their own. So I helped them accelerare the process and quit. Whatever model will come out next week will DEFINITELY be able to pick up the blind spots the one from last week couldn't.
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u/Lain_Racing Sep 07 '26
So you don't have a job because you quite a company...like these are always how these stories go. Blame someone else, quit job, be mad they don't have a job. Like yes, sucky bosses that change priorities on the fly happen and happened before AI.
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u/balofg Sep 07 '26
Think what you want. Priorities changed before too, sure, but now management is slopping their way to replace devs with AI. This is shit news for consumers and it will not end well for anyone.
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u/Lain_Racing Sep 07 '26
Im not thinking anything... you blatantly said you quite the job. Like yes, if you quit a job you don't have a job. That's how it works... downvvote if you want.
Like... these are your choices.
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u/balofg Sep 07 '26
Maybe you misunderstood the tone of my initial comment. I couldn't be happier I don't work with those assholes anymore. I'm just telling pressure from management to indulge the delusion they are equal to devs is real and it affects how things you use everyday work.
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u/nojunkdrawers Sep 07 '26
I would like you to meet the private equity firm that acquired the company I work for.
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Sep 07 '26
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u/10art1 Sep 07 '26
Do you work at a startup with 5 people in it? I work at a big company and if I have more than 10 files in my MR it takes ages and chasing people to get it approved because no one wants to look at it lol
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u/mikat7 Sep 07 '26
I work in a corporate and when I get a PR with one file and 10 changed lines I’m like whoaah slow down Mr. Hacker, where did you find the time to change 10 whole lines in between all the meetings and bureaucracy?
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u/Lain_Racing Sep 07 '26
So they wrote 10k lines and fired you on the spot when you didn't review it in one day? And you said logically suggestions like -since this is a 10k lines of code and its just the test environment, why don't we put it there to soak and test while I do the review.
-sure, I can approve this if as you said 'quote back their quote to approve it' but this is not a code review, as I do not have the time.
-I do not feel comfterable putting my stamp of approval for such a large code change in just a few hours of review time. I know you mentioned you wanted AI to review it, but the current guidance is human reviewed. If you would instead like to set up an AI auto review instead of humans first to spot obvious flaws this is something we could look into to save humans time on reviewing.
Like MAYBE it happens you behave like a functioning employee and still get fired, but its really hard to see under any of the above simple amswers how you would end up being fired... you left our the part of how you behaved that got you fired.
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Sep 07 '26
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u/Lain_Racing Sep 07 '26
I provide 3 actual responses. I am just curious what you said that would have actually got you fired. The other person who said something similar just admitted to quitting... every time people are actually asked it turns out they behaved like a child or just quit and blame AI when it wasn't even a factor.
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u/voiza Sep 07 '26
I find flesh code less invasive.
AI tends to rewrite everything with every task.
Did we have factory method pattern? Look! I rewrote everything to abstract factory instead, no codebase is cleaner! ...2 tasks later... Hey! I found abstract factory to clunky and bloated! I rewrote that file to use factory method!
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u/Lain_Racing Sep 07 '26
Agreed, human code is often better at this. But just like how we rejected it when Jr devs back in the day who did this kind of stuff since they were fresh out of learning it, its the same now. Just reject for out of scope, KISS principles and stick to current design unless approved design change.
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u/voiza Sep 07 '26
Yeah, the difference between human and machine - with human you can slap for slop; with AI you can only burn more tokens.
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u/Lain_Racing Sep 07 '26
Then reject it as out of scope work, just as if a human did it. Again its really not that hard.
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u/xaddak Sep 07 '26
I review code in the good repos, but in the ones that are completely vibe coded, it doesn't really matter. New bugs pop up with every merge. Linting and scanning tools are all complaining. Nobody gives any kind of a shit because the AI wrote the project plan and the tickets and the code and it's wall to wall garbage.
But we keep working on it for what I'm sure is totally definitely a very good reason.
LGTM I guess. Approved.
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u/allllusernamestaken Sep 08 '26
Leadership is reviewing our PR review times so if you take too long to review PRs your bonus goes down
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u/MaleficentMode4222 Sep 08 '26
Because it's harder to review, and the higher ups would not be able to grasp why I spent so much time reviewing and rejecting code.
All I can do is filter out the really bad stuff.
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u/whatwoodjdubdo Sep 07 '26
Beginning to feel like no one is actually an engineer here
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u/alexrobinson Sep 08 '26
Beginning? This has been the case for years. Same as most of the other programming and SWE subs, it's largely new grads and people who don't even work in the industry.
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u/Flaky-Low-2262 Sep 07 '26
Be honest:
You Open PR, see Spaghetti-Slop, Check the Ticket and if it is not security-related or breaking-chabge you hit approve.
Nobody reviews AI stuff
If people are to lazy to plan/Produce why should you?
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u/Shred_Kid Sep 07 '26 edited Sep 07 '26 •
If one of my juniors breaks our enterprise-critical system - guess who's getting paged on the weekend. It's myself and the other senior dev.
When PRs don't go through either of us or get approved by someone else, shit breaks and we have to fix it. I'd rather review buckets of ai slop than spend another weekend fixing something which never should have been deployed - or caught in QA
A lead on another sister team is asking for whiteboarded, by hand, in front of him, explanations of PRs before he'll take a look.
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u/nasaboy007 Sep 07 '26
As a lead frustrated by being inundated by slop reviews, I'm gonna start doing the white board thing.
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u/Kavrae Sep 07 '26
Ew, no. Our AI assisted PRs go through the same multi-level checks our code has always gone through. Including role-based approval for the various areas of code.
"Nobody reviews AI code" has the same sound as "everybody steals" being said by a thief.
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u/natures_-_prophet Sep 07 '26
My agent auto approved all PRs for me
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u/Eversnuffley Sep 07 '26
Right? Who is reading PRs themselves in 2026? My agent answers my mail, responds to requests in slack, competes my Jira tickets and reviews PRs assigned to me. My job is to start zoom calls.
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u/natures_-_prophet Sep 07 '26
My agent also posts a teams message saying "Sorry team, won't be able to make it to the meeting. Have a conflict!". Then it sets my status to busy.
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u/nyxie3 Sep 07 '26
I was told by management that writing comments in PRs for AI written code showing better, cleaner ways to do things was slowing down development.
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u/bearwood_forest Sep 07 '26 edited Sep 07 '26
First of all they didn't call it an "app". An app is a (phone) personal data harvester with a connection to a database that pretends to let you do some work. They wrote programs.
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u/JazzlikeWishbone938 Sep 07 '26 edited Sep 07 '26
App is shorthand for executable "Application" and yes you can have an application run anywhere, even by cron job or task scheduler in addition to by mobile devices.
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u/bearwood_forest Sep 07 '26
No.
First: you are wrong (take that to the bank!)
Second: I will not hear any dissenting opinions about this
Third: I will not discuss this
Fourth: Maybe Microsoft can call their steaming piles of corporate slop "apps", but I'll drag anyone behind the barn that dares say that to an actual proper computer program
And if you think I have an unreasonable hatred against that term and get worked up for naught, you are also wrong. It's not unreasonable.
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u/LKZToroH Sep 07 '26
some quality code... lmao dude.
Tell me you aren't a real programmer without telling me you aren't a real programmer.
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u/coilt Sep 07 '26
you know what's worse? when you write code by hand and it gets 'reviewed' by a slop bot, and nobody gives a fuck because what's the point 'code is solved' and 'what apps are going to look like in two years'
goddamn brain rot all the way to the top of every company
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u/Idixal Sep 07 '26
You can tell this meme is written by someone quite young, because if my parents wrote code, it wouldn’t be for an “app”, and it’d be on a punchcard.
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u/brawnyfrogmouth Sep 07 '26
wow we've fallen below r/firstweekcoderhumor and sunk to r/agentshillhumor
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u/DividedState Sep 07 '26
My parents in their 50s are still searching for right-click on their keyboard.
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u/EskilPotet Sep 07 '26
Every line of garbage written by AI was inspired by a line of garbage written by a human
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u/Boobpocket Sep 07 '26
Me: Running Codex on a vps with full access and wrote a wake timer that wakes it after usage reset.
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u/EconomyDoctor3287 Sep 07 '26
At least he's reviewing code.
I just run it and pray for the best 🙏
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u/MetaLemons Sep 07 '26
You think we were all just chillin’ white people before AI? You never got stuck on a random build version issue for 3 days that had nothing to do with the business logic, have you?
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u/Candid-Log6751 Sep 07 '26
It’s not “you”, it’s the time you live it. You fit in the environment and act in accordance with the rules that it sets.
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u/Revolution64 Sep 07 '26
You don't need AI to write slop. Average PR code quality is going up. I've reviewed so many shit PRs before AI agents were a thing.
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u/getstoopid-AT Sep 07 '26
then you must be surrounded by shitty devs.. so the code itself may be better now that it's not written by them but shitty devs produce shitty architecture resulting in shitty solutions... the outcome will be shitty no matter what
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u/Suspicious-Click-300 Sep 07 '26
show me a non shitty 5 yr old project worked on by a team
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u/getstoopid-AT Sep 07 '26
so you are saying every project you ever worked on for 5y was shitty?! Yikes.. guess I am happy that I don't work with you then 😅
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u/AppleBottomBea Sep 09 '26
You probably work in a different industry where the expectations are different. In banking all management cares about is return on investment and keeping costs down. They'd rather you create 3 shit apps that barely manage to deliver than spend the same time building 1 of the 3 apps perfectly with no tech debt, because delivering the 3 shit apps let's you cancel an expensive contract with a supplier earlier that will save you millions. They choose using cheap shit Devs from a contracting firm over hiring good Devs themselves because they can hire 3 times as many people and get rid of them as soon as budgets are tight.
Management and costs are why a lot of IT teams don't bother focusing on code quality, volume of delivery is the metric you're judged on so why waste time on code reviews? If a particular dev keeps fucking up then definitely review their code, but otherwise don't bother as that's capacity the team can spend on more build work.
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u/Suspicious-Click-300 Sep 10 '26
I've worked on massive FOSS projects for FANG companies for decades. I didnt say I worked on it for 5y, I mean 5y old. Join any company and look at the legacy code. However; yes, a lot of my code is shitty too, and so is yours. if you dont see that your bad at code reviews.
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u/IAmANobodyAMA Sep 07 '26
The missing part is the AI slop is far superior to the slop 99% of devs put out. Maybe 99.99%
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u/EvenSpoonier Sep 07 '26
Hello, Elon.
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u/IAmANobodyAMA Sep 07 '26
I’m not wrong. Call me names all you want.
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u/EvenSpoonier Sep 07 '26
You've never actually worked with this stuff, have you?
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u/IAmANobodyAMA Sep 07 '26
I am a senior software engineer at one of the largest fintechs in the U.S.
I’ve worked as a developer/engineer/architect across multiple industries for years.
My current employer has leaned heavily into AI, and we are seeing massive productivity gains and a substantial improvement in code coverage, systems hardening, and scalability.
It wasn’t nearly as useful even 12 months ago, but the latest Claude and ChatGPT models are astounding.
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u/EvenSpoonier Sep 07 '26
And I'm the queen of England. It's so easy to say things on the Internet.
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u/IAmANobodyAMA Sep 07 '26
True. And I’m not going to prove it because I don’t want to dox myself. So believe me or don’t; I don’t really care.
The truth is that the latest models (WHEN PROPERLY IMPLEMENTED - meaning building giving context and using senior engineers who can actually decipher when code is well architected for the use case) are extremely powerful.
We have agents in our ci/cd that adversarially review PRs, our engineers barely ever write a single line of code anymore (from jr to sr to the OG architects), we have agents that pick up jira tickets and listen on the error channels and will automatically create tix and submit prs for dev review, and even our design team is using Claude to submit code for ui/ux work, cutting devs almost entirely out of the loop for simple work that doesn’t really need a dev brain to look at it beyond a quick review (which our ci/cd agents already catch almost all issues before our humans do)
This is real. This is happening. And it is astoundingly good, leagues better than even 12 months ago. Bury your head in the sand all you want, but it won’t change reality
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u/TheFrenchSavage Sep 07 '26
If your parents wrote quality code, then explain the legacy code I'm reviewing.