Comment by andrelaszlo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrelaszlo | Hacker News Reader

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The "good catch" thing is something I do, too, but mostly for short review comments like "this will blow up if x is null" etc.

I had to think a bit about it, but when it feels off it can be something like:

- I wrote several paragraphs explaining my reasoning, expecting some follow-up questions.

- The "fix" didn't really address my concerns, making it seem like they just said "okay" without really trying to understand. (The times when the whole PR is replaced makes it seem like my review was also just forwarded to the LLM, haha)

- I'm also comparing to how I often (especially earlier in my career) thought a lot about how to solve things, and when I got constructive feedback it felt pretty rewarding - and I could often give my own reasoning for why I did things a certain way. Sometimes I had tried a bunch of the things that the reviewer suggested, leading to a more lively back-and-forth. This could just be me, of course, or a cultural thing, but my expectation also comes from how other developers I've worked with react to my reviews.

Does that make sense? I'd be interested in hearing more about the problem you're dealing with. If this is not the right place, feel free to send an email :)

I had this experience even before LLMs, in particular when working with developers who came up in a non-western educational environment. There was a mindset that the only thing that matters is making the boss happy, and in a code review context the reviewer plays the role of boss, so the mindset is "do whatever is required for the boss to stop complaining", not "how can I learn from the knowledge this person is sharing". It's a fundamental difference in how people relate to one another professionally, and I think LLMs have spread this kind of attitude into broader cultural contexts - the devaluation of critical thinking and learning as a necessary part of the job and a more mercenary focus on uncritically churning out whatever the boss asked for.

The doomer perspective would be that people are getting dumber and more complacent and that this will unravel society, but that might not actually be the case if we consider that the mindset already existed in other societies that still thrive. Perhaps the people who never really gave a crap about the quality of their work were right all along? After all, despite the fact most of us are in the top 20% of earners in our countries and easily the top 10% or an even more elite minority globally, end of the day we are still "code peasants" who build whatever our boss told us to build so that an ultra-wealthy investor class can compound their wealth. Why should we waste our time caring about that? Why not get an AI to grind out garbage on our behalf? Why not focus our energies on more rewarding pursuits in our personal lives?

Of course I am playing devil's advocate here, because for me personally being forced to show up for work every day thanks to capitalism and then doing a half-assed job makes me more depressed than trying to excel at something I never wanted to do in the first place. But there is a part of me that understands the mindset and wonders if my life might be easier if I shared it.

Anyway, prior to LLMs I dealt with this phenomenon by reluctantly accepting that most people don't care anywhere near as much about the quality of their work as I do, and that it was hopeless trying to change them. Find the few who do care and prioritize actually-productive knowledge exchanges with them. Drop your standards for people who clearly don't care. If the code doesn't meet your standards but it's still more-or-less functional, just let it go. You might imagine it'll reflect poorly on you, except in reality management doesn't care anyway - the push to AI all the things right now is the "mask off" moment. Every now and then you'll still find a motivated junior who really is passionate about getting better and then being a part of their growth is still rewarding.

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