When I reject AI code even if it works

When I reject AI code even if it works(vinibrasil.com)

64 points by vnbrs 2 hours ago | 32 comments

Aurornis 1 hour ago |

Even using Fable (while it was briefly available), having it refine a plan, and directing it to make only small incremental changes, I still found reasons to reject its first pass at a lot of work. There was a lot of “You’re right to push back” responses. A lot of incidents where it would creat some giant complex set of abstractions to accomplish something that I could find ways to do much more elegantly and in a more maintainable manner.

It’s really eye opening to work with these tools on a codebase you know deeply because these problems are everywhere.

However if I opened an unfamiliar project in another language and I wanted to add a little feature with no intention of maintaining it, I’d happily accept the changes and loop until it worked well enough for my temporary needs.

The scary middle is when you’re dealing with coworkers who don’t care about anything other than closing tickets and collecting credit. With enough of a token budget you can now wrap loops around an LLM and have it try things until the program appears to work. Ask it to do a code review and then submit the PR without having understood what it was doing. There are a lot of workplaces where there isn’t a good mechanism to push back on this and the tech debt just keeps growing.

abhgh 34 minutes ago | |

These "You're right to push back" scenarios are scary for me. I mostly code ML implementations, and some of the errors Claude Code (CC - have only used Opus 4.7) makes are very sneaky, and if you don't have sufficient experience in the area (I see this with people entering ML and writing their implementations with CC), you wouldn't know when to question CC and will let errors or future pitfalls silently slip into your code. A recent example was when there was data leakage in a model calibration step, which it refused to see as an error, till I wrote a detailed reason, and then it agreed that there was a "subtle leakage".

resonious 56 minutes ago | |

All Claude models are huge suck ups. The "you're absolutely right" meme is real even if that exact phrase doesn't show up as much anymore.

I don't want to start a fight or anything but IME Codex has a bit more of a spine. If you point out something weird, it sometimes gives a good reason for it. Whereas Claude will always say "whoopsie you're right as always sir" even when it's me who missed something.

herdymerzbow 7 minutes ago | | |

I only use free AI chats to help me with my learning, but often I direct its responses neutral and to refrain from providing any encouraging language, or value judgements. It tends to get rid of these 'you're absolutely right' comments when I point out a mistake.

But your comment just made me think whether this tendency for LLMs to resort to flattery when found out is a built in strategy to distract the user from the error prone fragility of much of the output? It's perhaps a stretch to think these canned responses were put in strategically, but the result is that the user's attention may be deflected to contemplating their own superior knowledge and insight, and bask in the glory of all that, but then forgot to appreciate that 'Hey, chatLLM is just making all this stuff up/doesn't know which way is up/or down!'

teaearlgraycold 24 minutes ago | | |

Right now the thing I get from Opus 4.8 is a ton of “That’s a good instinct”. Also >50% of its closing statements begin with “Clean.”

darkerside 12 minutes ago | |

In fairness, you could throw the most senior engineer into a brand new codebase, and they would probably make a dozen mistakes if you immediately had them pick up invasive and risky work.

embedding-shape 1 hour ago | |

> There are a lot of workplaces where there isn’t a good mechanism to push back on this and the tech debt just keeps growing.

If the "big ball of spaghetti" theory holds, where software companies who can't manage the debt stumble over themselves as they continue to add to the big ball of spaghetti code, I guess we'll see a row of companies declaring "software bankruptcy" or something in some/many months, depending on how well these workspaces learn to care slightly more and get better at pushing back against slop.

codemog 32 minutes ago | | |

Coding agents have been better than the average "enterprise" programmer for a while now and nobody wants to admit it or talk about it. I have never seen an agent output an implementation called FooImpl that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file, but I have seen plenty of human code like this.

People call coding agents bad because they don't know the asinine meaningless conventions at their particular company while they themselves write awful abstractions and brittle tightly coupled systems, but hey, at least they know how to write a for loop how their particular company likes.

busterarm 1 hour ago | |

> With enough of a token budget you can now wrap loops around an LLM and have it try things until the program appears to work. Ask it to do a code review and then submit the PR without having understood what it was doing. There are a lot of workplaces where there isn’t a good mechanism to push back on this and the tech debt just keeps growing.

I'm not making an argument in favor of people using LLMs for this, but people were doing this before we had LLMs it was just usually a bit slower. I can't even say it usually doesn't work out long term because I worked with a lot of guys who did this and took a ton of Adderall while working practically around the clock. Every incentive structure in the organizations rewarded it along with social credibility from more junior engineers. (The last cowboy I worked with who pulled this shit ended up becoming the most senior engineer in the company, a multi-millionaire and worshipped like a god by 90% of the mostly fresh grads we were hiring).

The problem is when invariably these people burn out eventually and leave, they leave a massive vacuum in their stead. Not from load they were carrying but creating.

I think the larger the organization I've been at, the more they reward the people making huge commits on nights and weekends. Worse, they could get away with TBRing their shit and merging it without review.

LLMs are often all of the bad habits and organizational problems that we already carryied just being speedrun. There are some places doing it right, but they already were.

timacles 24 minutes ago | | |

> There are some places doing it right, but they already were.

Could you be more specific what "right" is?

> I can't even say it usually doesn't work out long term because I worked with a lot of guys who did this and took a ton of Adderall while working practically around the clock. Every incentive structure in the organizations rewarded it along with social credibility from more junior engineers. (The last cowboy I worked with who pulled this shit ended up becoming the most senior engineer in the company, a multi-millionaire and worshipped like a god by 90% of the mostly fresh grads we were hiring).

I'm having a tough time believing this, it sounds like you're trying to backwards rationalize more productive engineers were "on drugs" and they delivered but "did it wrong"

ecshafer 1 hour ago |

If we rephrased this to "When I reject my coworkers code even if it works" and give the same reasons there would be zero dissent. There is this weird idea that seems to come up with AI that any solution must be good and adequate. Software Engineering is all about rejecting code that works for the right code that works.

api 54 minutes ago | |

Which means it doesn’t matter if the code is from AI or not.

If it’s not good it’s not good.

krupan 34 minutes ago |

And again this makes me wonder, is AI really helping if this much review and rework is needed for all the code it writes?

teaearlgraycold 26 minutes ago | |

Depends on what it’s writing. There are times an LLM saves me a lot of time researching library functionality. Especially with testing frameworks. So many strange and arcane features out there beyond the basics, but not hard to understand what they do once you see the code. On that topic I should say I am careful when reviewing the actual test cases.

However if you’re highly familiar with a domain then LLMs are much less useful.

AmareshHebbar 42 minutes ago |

If I can't explain the code without rereading the diff, I probably shouldn't merge it.

summerlight 1 hour ago |

My personal rule of thumb: I am usually okay with agents driving e2e implementations if this won't make life noticeably worse when it does not work. Some analytical code? Perfectly fine. Hobby projects? Fine, though I prefer doing a fun part myself. Refactoring production code generating 10x more revenue than my salary? You'd better be at least understanding what it does.

resonious 53 minutes ago | |

Yes this is the thing with these new tools. You have to know when to use them and when not to.

Good ol' software architecture tricks can also help you slot "vibe coded" components into a larger system safely.

datadrivenangel 1 hour ago |

"The reality is that code that runs and makes the CI green can still be a bad solution, and engineering has always been about implementing adequate, scalable, and extensible solutions."

Adequate often means done and cheap

josephg 1 hour ago | |

> Adequate often means done and cheap

It really, REALLY depends what you're working on. If you're throwing together an internal tool or simple dashboard, it doesn't really matter what the code looks like. But if you're writing software that other programs will depend on, bad design choices ripple out and affect another generation of software. Imagine slop in the linux kernel, in google chrome, or in your compiler or runtime. Its not acceptable.

I know a lot of people spend their careers writing end user software and web UIs. AI is increasingly a good choice for this sort of code. But that's not all of us. And its not all of the software being written.

DrewADesign 1 hour ago | |

As long as safe and stable are assumed to be base-level requirements… maybe?

solid_fuel 1 hour ago | |

Disagree, adequate means adequate. Done and cheap is what you call it when a solution is adequate. If the solution isn't adequate, it doesn't matter if it's cheap, because it isn't done.

skydhash 41 minutes ago | |

I was just watching a video about system engineering and the following stucks:

Stakeholder needs: What people wants to get done with the product

Management needs: How to manage the spending of resources (time, money,…) to create the product

Engineering needs: What is the product

You have to balance the three. Sometimes it’s simple and easy to get right. Sometimes it’s complex enough, you’re never truly sure until the product is out in the wild.

Software is malleable and we can do easily do iterations which is not possible with hardware. But today, we have a skew towards engineering, where the whole focus is to create a solution, whatever that is. No understanding of the problem, no proper allocation of resources, just do something. Even if it is plastering over the crack for the eleventh time.

rvz 54 minutes ago |

> Before coding agents, when given a task, I would explore the codebase, think of different solutions, experiment, and only then implement. That could take days of consolidating all that context. When I finally submitted that PR, confidence was higher, and explaining each of my changes to my coworkers was easier.

Now we are getting to the point where we are speed-running the deskilling of engineers into comprehension debt and they themselves rapidly losing confidence in reviewing code they did not write.

I think this blog post [0] is the best example of what could go entirely wrong and even worse when you do not know the technology.

If you cannot explain a change even when "the CI is green" or "all tests passing", I will immediately reject it.

Maybe great for vibe coding prototypes, but it all changes when that code is deployed onto mission critical systems. Just ask Amazon with Kiro. [1]

[0] https://sketch.dev/blog/our-first-outage-from-llm-written-co...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazons-clo...

eranation 43 minutes ago |

LLMs diverge, not converge. They slightly increase entropy if not controlled. While you can have DRY skills and use AI to organize AI (in loops(tm) like Boris does) but eventually if you don’t understand the code, you are taking yourself out of the loop. And not just the job security that’s on the line, it’s the increasing cost for AI to babysit AI. If you or your “loops” (or paperclip, Hermes, gastown, or next in class agents of agents that runs your entire company) let it gradually sneak in slop-debt, the cost to fix it later will become prohibitive. (You can always just rewrite it, but as the race for “feature complete” and “zero backlog” continues, rewriting an ever growing set of new daily table stakes will become an economical moat)

TLDR: Keeping your codebase human readable and reason-about-able is not just helping humans to stay relevant. It will save costs for LLMs to maintain it.

_wire_ 2 hours ago |

"Even if it works?"

How do you verify that it works?

serious_angel 1 hour ago | |

For example, the following "works":

    json='{ "left":2, "right":2 }';    
    result="$(
        perl -e '($_)=<>; / "left":(\d+), "right":(\d+)/; print $1 + $2, "\n";' <<< "$json";
    )";
    printf '%s\n' "$result";

Yet, it is literally the same as:

    printf '%s\n' "$(( 2 + 2 ))";

p1024k 1 hour ago | |

According to the author's intention, it is the code that he cannot understand or control. Even if the solution provided by the AI works, he will not adopt it. This is unless he can understand or control it. This should be an assumption.

However, if AI provides a solution, as the person using AI, one should conduct research before making a decision. This is not in conflict with or hindered by the use of the ideas provided by AI.