Before AI, I was spending a lot of time fixing slop left behind by people who didn’t seem to care about quality.
Now, I (am forced to) use AI to clean up slop from the same people, but they’re also armed with AI (though, to be fair, I think AI adoption actually had a net positive effect on their code quality).
So yeah I agree, it’s definitely magnified.
Honestly though, slop cleanup doesn’t affect my mood as much anymore, now that I don’t have to do it manually. I had AI agents identify ~15 bugs yesterday. Then, I had agents handle the entire flow for each one in parallel: Create a ticket in the issue tracker, fix the bug (TDD approach), open a PR, monitor CI while it runs, wait for review (and address change requests/feedback), merge, then close the ticket. It was a lot more in a single day than I used to do manually.
I remember the 90’s when “visual coding” was going to be the rage.
I worked at a place where a bunch of non-coders started writing apps and tools using what was in retrospect basically a dumbed-down Scratch
Every other day some co-worker would come to my desk and ask for help. Debugging those fucking pretty graphs of programs took 10x the work of just writing the entire simple tool from scratch, esp using fancy new object-oriented C++.
Before AI, I was spending a lot of time fixing slop left behind by people who didn’t seem to care about quality.
Now, I (am forced to) use AI to clean up slop from the same people, but they’re also armed with AI (though, to be fair, I think AI adoption actually had a net positive effect on their code quality).
So yeah I agree, it’s definitely magnified.
Honestly though, slop cleanup doesn’t affect my mood as much anymore, now that I don’t have to do it manually. I had AI agents identify ~15 bugs yesterday. Then, I had agents handle the entire flow for each one in parallel: Create a ticket in the issue tracker, fix the bug (TDD approach), open a PR, monitor CI while it runs, wait for review (and address change requests/feedback), merge, then close the ticket. It was a lot more in a single day than I used to do manually.
I remember the 90’s when “visual coding” was going to be the rage.
I worked at a place where a bunch of non-coders started writing apps and tools using what was in retrospect basically a dumbed-down Scratch
Every other day some co-worker would come to my desk and ask for help. Debugging those fucking pretty graphs of programs took 10x the work of just writing the entire simple tool from scratch, esp using fancy new object-oriented C++.