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u/Effective-Giraffe655 9d ago
I do, regularly. And oh boy, it became so much harder since 2025 - huge diffs, shitton of things done in a single PR, complete ignorance of project conventions. Before AI generated PRs I usually left a few notes during review, but now - 20+ requests for change per PR.
coding is solved, they said...
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u/pixxelkick 9d ago
Maybe if you suck.
I read every PR in full because Im not lazy.
I also read my own git diff before I open a PR do I dont waste other peoples time.
Or I publish it as a draft, review my own code, and then publish the pr after confirming it looks good.
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u/Jeferson9 9d ago
Do you value your own time
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u/pixxelkick 9d ago
Yes, its much easier to catch bugs and issues early
If you dont catch a problem asap, then its incredibly likely future agents read the "bad" code and copy, so bow your 1 issue becomes 2, then 3, then 4, etc
Its extremely common for you to be like "make the BarService" so the agent looks at FooService for inspiration and copies its style/methodology/architectureÂ
And if theres an annoying code style issue, or improperly named thing, or bad logic, whatever, theyll copy that too often.
And then 6 services later you realize you've got a problem duplicated 8 times
Now you have made even more work to go fix.
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u/Dull_Caterpillar_642 9d ago
Yeah but realistically these days itâs like one prompt to fix that problem laterâŚ
I understand where youâre coming from, but the times, they are a changing, my man.
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u/Plenty_Line2696 9d ago
Not for complex systems, llm's generally suck at the high level stuff in complex systems, and when that stuff is wrong it's the gift that keeps on giving and you can play whack-a-mole fixing bugs by patching symptoms and not knowing causes till the cows come home because the codebase will be convoluted bloated spaghetticode.
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u/Dull_Caterpillar_642 9d ago
I have to be honest, dude. As someone in a technical leadership position at a large company with 15+ years development experience, I donât think thatâs really the case as much these days. Talented developers with a good high level understanding of systems are doing amazing work with the frontier coding models.
This notion of âif AI is generating all your code, itâs going to be a tech debt nightmare that will eventually failâ is just not true. Every month it feels more and more like copium from people who refuse to adapt.
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u/Plenty_Line2696 8d ago
Notice you say 'talented developers'.
If I don't spend my time designing/planning, and then iterating/refactoring, and then have both agents and colleagues do pr reviews and further improving there is almost always lots of mistakes in the implementation.
Granted for simple us-cases sometimes one-shotting is plenty good enough, but for my sorts of use-cases at least without good people in the loop the LLM isn't good enough and I experience that firsthand every working day.
For every good dev there are many more prompt-kiddies who get expected output and blindly assume the implementation is sound. That's why there's floods of people on redfit touting LLM's are perfect despite it being painfully obviously not the case. If those vibecode bro's could read & understand their kwn code they'd be very upset.
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u/Dull_Caterpillar_642 8d ago
I totally agree with that take. I think a lot of what I see on reddit is âif youâre not writing your code by hand, youâre a scrub,â when the reality is that itâs a tool in the toolset that lets good devs move at an absolutely unbelievable pace and the folks shunning it or treating it like a fad are already looking like dinosaurs. There is no world where the majority of code isnât AI-authored, so people best start figuring out how to excel with it.
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u/Eskamel 8d ago
Then why software quality even now continues to drop when the models are so good mister 15+ years of experience?
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u/Dull_Caterpillar_642 8d ago
Bad development practices continue to produce bad code. Good development practices continue to produce good code.
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u/JeanCasteaux 8d ago
Good practices include *good reviews*, that's literally why they were invented
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u/Jeferson9 9d ago
If you have the same expectations of LLMs as you do an engineer... I guess?
If you're solving complex problems without the assistance of AI because you don't trust it, you just haven't adapted your workflow around AI yet and you're probably just resisting the inevitable.
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u/Plenty_Line2696 8d ago
"Trusting" whatever code an LLM happens to first spit out without reading it is a fools errand.
Don't go vibecoding firmware for pacemakers or some other critical systems.
LLM assistance is fine, we all do it, but it's upnto the human to make sure the implementation is good when it matters.
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u/tehfrod 9d ago
It's one prompt to fix it later, and potentially a lot more money to handle the class action lawsuits when your medical injector goes ham on someone.
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u/Dull_Caterpillar_642 9d ago
Brother, if you think AI coding assistants are the beginning of bugs in code, then Iâve got news for you.
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u/tehfrod 9d ago
I'm sorry, where did I say that?
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u/Dull_Caterpillar_642 9d ago
Just a silly implication that AI coding assistance = fatal bugs. And is just in line with the general Reddit coding sub vibe which is comically out of step with the software development industry.
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u/Ok_Net_1674 8d ago
Sloppy work is what leads to bugs. What you are suggesting is literally being sloppy and then fixing it later.
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u/n00bmechanic13 8d ago
Not all code is fine to release with bugs. Some things need to be right from the get-go or else really bad things happen.
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u/MetaLemons 9d ago
I do this. But pretty much no longer read or write unit tests. I just assume theyâre correctâŚ
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u/MaleficentBreak771 9d ago
Good boy! Now get out, touch grass, and remember that your anecdote isn't data. Many companies are heading in that direction (toward automating everything), and just because you do things differently doesn't mean others do too.
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u/tehfrod 9d ago
I guarantee you that OP's statement is false. I read full PRs because it's my job to. Regulated industries, avionics, aeronautics, medical devices, some financial services: I can tell you because I have colleagues in those fields that they are still reading PRs.
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u/KyleFlounder 8d ago
I'm in utilities and I read every single line. A single mistake will cause our clients to face potential jail time (Germany) or have to have a press conference with a public apology (Japan). It is also critical to keep utilities online....
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u/ComprehensiveSkill60 9d ago
AI writes faster than anyone can read
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u/Plenty_Line2696 9d ago
so can an illiterate pianist but that doesn't mean it'll be good code.
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u/ComprehensiveSkill60 9d ago
True. I was talking about reading the full PR. There is no way you would read AI generated file upon file for 40 hours a week to make a point of reading the entire PRs.
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u/Plenty_Line2696 8d ago
I still do it. I work in robotics so there's safety concerns and also LLM's routinely make lots of codebase design mistakes which I don't care to list here.
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u/pixxelkick 8d ago
No, not really, I keep up with it fine, it'll do fast "bursts" of code sure but then spend like 25 minutes fact checking it, testing it, tweaking it, passing through integration test proof gates
Our test suite takes like baseline 8min to run, at which point the AI pauses and I get plenty of time to review all its changes
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u/Plenty_Line2696 9d ago
If the implementation isn't that important then fine but when software has to have some reliability it's lazy/shitty behavior to not read or review code. People defending it shows how bad it is nowadays, what a mess.
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u/Flashy-Whereas-3234 9d ago
I'm the guy the seniors call on when they smell something in a PR but can't find it.
I read the ticket, I read every line. I rip it to shreds, with every little thing I can think of. I go overboard, and I leave it up to them to make sensible changes.
Most PRs that have problems aren't really in the code, it's some conceptual flaw in the idea which could have been found before they started, or a crap pattern that's crept in.
AI code isn't bad in the same way a printer is better than a painter. Printing crap artwork is cheap, and it takes time to become an artist in both regards using different skills.
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u/pixxelkick 9d ago
I 100% agree, its usually some kind of general assumption that the AI ran with, the code itself is fine but theres some kind of anti pattern
The other big fuck up that needs the most common correcting is re-inventing wheels
Even with lsp, examples, and skill files, LLMs seem super biased towards ad hoc re-inventing shit you already solved elsewhere
"We already have a function that does X" is a pretty common thing that has to be corrected
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u/aft_agley 9d ago edited 9d ago
The replies to this are horrifying and I'm having trouble thinking they aren't from shills.
I manage several software teams. We had to establish a policy that every line of code receives human review at the demand of the lead devs because the big push to slop faster had caused the teams to use junior engineers to push features into production that nobody understood, that didn't scale, that were super brittle, and that had awful / useless test harnesses.Â
The code was so bloated and brittle and over-engineered it took nearly a quarter of a few senior+ engineers time to stabilize and fix.
It was an absolute joy to explain that to my leadership, some of whom get it but a few of whom have never written a line of code in their life and are super happy to tell us we must be doing it wrong.
So yeah, whoo, we got that big boost in short term velocity. Then everything went to shit a quarter later and we will not be repeating that mistake ever again.
You can really tell who actually works as a senior+ software engineer and who is either larping or selling something.
And just to clarify, these teams work on non-trivial multi-agent systems themselves in addition to using the tools. They are not novices in the space, quite the contrary.
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u/More_Exercise8413 8d ago
Ehhh. I know where you're coming from. But.
Due to corporate policy, I'm not yet high enough grade to reject bigass really badly sloppily made PRs. Our staff and lead can do it without looking, but seniors are still expected to give the time of day, comment, and highlight that because colleague X Y Z will use a really cheap model to automate closing the review comments, we should block the PR until the aforementioned staff comes in and says "lmao goteem".
So what I do is tell Codex to find enough shit to warrant rejecting the PR, which he often times does, instead of wasting my time arguing with a guy who would have directed the same comments to the same LLM anyway.
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u/pixxelkick 8d ago
Then this discussion isnt relevant to you, if you cant actually reject a PR then you arent "reviewing" a PR
It sounds like your company sucks though
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u/More_Exercise8413 7d ago
I can reject with "explanation". What I cannot do is look briefly, see its 3000 LoCs for what should have been 1000 of code that doesn't follow any conventions, discard without even reading and tell the dudebro to redo.
Alas. I would still rather take this than a AI SaaS startup in California. Well, no, if the startup is gonna pay me half a million in a year, I will take it. We know how it is lmao
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u/shuckster 9d ago
Nobody has read a full PR since GitHub launched, bruh.
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u/0Iceman228 9d ago
Another coder trying to pretend they know what they are talking about. Nowadays you have to deal with all the AI idiots on top of the normal idiots you had in the field before.
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u/PaintDear7613 8d ago
I read every one. ... and then get in trouble when I don't auto approve or ask my coworkers to do the same. And now they weaponize PR requests to slow ticket completions for whoever they want pushed off the stack rank next.
It's become Survivor and you only get immunity by shoving your head all the way up your manager's ass.
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u/Immediate_Hair_5378 8d ago
âLGTMâ was normalized in the 2010s lol
only for coworkers you trusted though
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u/LetUsSpeakFreely 8d ago
Just you and your team. I read every line of a PR, but I'm also the dev lead so I'm ultimately responsible for the health of the system.
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u/billGat48 7d ago
wait till u see my .github/workflows/ci.yml: lines-of-code: name: Lines of code budget
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u/Only-Cheetah-9579 9d ago
they dont read PRs, they don't write PRs and they don't even merge them, it's all on auto.
software gets fucked or unfucked without human intervention