A year ago leadership told us everything goes through agents now. Hand written code needed a reason. It felt great for about 6 months, we shipped more than we ever had.
Now the codebase is around 3x the size it was and nobody can explain how most of it works. The agents struggle too, they keep re-implementing helpers that already exist somewhere else because there are 4 versions of everything.
The part that actually hurts is who is left. The two people who used to read every PR and push back left in the spring, one quit, one was “restructured”.
coderabbit still comments on every PR, but there’s nobody left who can tell if a comment matters or not, so people just resolve them all.
This month management started quietly asking us to “write more of it ourselves” again. Except half of us haven’t written anything non trivial in a year and it shows. I spent 2 days on something I would have done in an afternoon in 2024.
Not sure what I want from posting this.
Is anyone else at the point where the mandate is being walked back, and how did you get the understanding back?
This happened at one of my old workplaces before A.I., with just humans. We had no standards and junior devs were given free reign to do whatever they want.
I still remember the horror when I realised my coworker copy pasted the entire 200,000 LOC (lines of code) Invoicing page to make specialised Quotation, Payment, Report Payment, and Bulk Payment page. Then they slowly made dozens of small changes and tweaks to it with no documentation. Instead of adapting and extending the existing page, we ended up with literally 5x 200k+ LOC modules.
Good God, it took 2 months to untangle and consolidate that mess, and we were still discovering bugs 6 months later. Now imagine that, but A.I. does it at scale.
My company is in the depths of the sub agent experiment. I am one of the ones who push back usually with the comment “this came out too complicated, can it be simplified?”. I’m afraid I’m not long for the company because I use ai the same way I used to use an offshore team; To execute more of the work I planned.
This is the full post
This happened at one of my old workplaces before A.I., with just humans. We had no standards and junior devs were given free reign to do whatever they want.
I still remember the horror when I realised my coworker copy pasted the entire 200,000 LOC (lines of code) Invoicing page to make specialised Quotation, Payment, Report Payment, and Bulk Payment page. Then they slowly made dozens of small changes and tweaks to it with no documentation. Instead of adapting and extending the existing page, we ended up with literally 5x 200k+ LOC modules.
Good God, it took 2 months to untangle and consolidate that mess, and we were still discovering bugs 6 months later. Now imagine that, but A.I. does it at scale.
My company is in the depths of the sub agent experiment. I am one of the ones who push back usually with the comment “this came out too complicated, can it be simplified?”. I’m afraid I’m not long for the company because I use ai the same way I used to use an offshore team; To execute more of the work I planned.