I am a programmer, not a rubber-stamp that approves Copilot generated code

Im working on some website and created some custom menu. Nothing fancy. AI got it done after some tries and I was happy as web development is not my area of expertise. After some time I realized the menu results to scrolling when it shouldn’t and wanted to make the parent container expand. This was impossible as the AI did a rather unusual implementation even for such a limited use case. Best part: my task now is impossible to solve with AI as it doesn’t really get its own code. I resulted to actually just looking into CSS and the docs and realized there is a MUCH simpler way to solve all of my issues.

Turns out sometimes the next guy who has to do maintenance is oneself.

This is pretty much how permanent staff often have to work with consultants/contractors or job-hoppers in some sectors.

Shiny new stuff quickly produced, manager smiles and pays, contractor disappears, heaven help the poor staffers who have to maintain it.

It's not new, just in a new form.

This has been described a lot as “workslop”, work that superficially looks great but pushes the real burden on the receiver of the work rather than the producer.

One of the things about AI generally is it doesn't "save" work - it pushes work from the one who generates the work to the person who has to evaluate it.

That sounds more like an organizational problem. If you are an employee that doesn't care about maintainability of code, e.g. a freelancer working on a project you will never touch again after your contract is over, your incentive has always been to write crappy code as quickly as possible. Previously that took the form of copying cheap templates, copying and pasting code from StackOverflow as-is without adjustments, not caring about style, using tools to autogenerate bindings, and so on. I remember a long time ago I took over a web project that a freelancer had worked on, and when I opened it I saw one large file of mixed python and HTML. He literally just copied and pasted whole html pages into the render statements in the server code.

The same is true for many people submitting PRs to OSS. They don't care about making real contributions, they just want to put something on their resume.

AI is probably making it more common, but it really isn't a new issue, and is not directly related to LLMs.

I'd say is a change of paradigm, and it might be even faster if you have test-driven development... Imagine writing your tests manually, getting LLM code, trying to pass the tests, done.

Of course, golden rules are 1. write the tests yourself, don't let the LLM write them for you and 2. don't paste this code directly on the LLM prompt and let it generate code for you.

In the end it boils down to specification: the prompt captures the loosely-defined specification of what you want, LLM spouts something already very similar to what you want, tweak it, test it, off you go.

With test driven development this process can be made simpler, and other changes in other parts of the code are also checked.

I've decided to fight it the same way I fight tactical tornadoes - by leaving those people negative reviews at mid-year review.

(I also find the people who simply paste LLM output to you in chat are the much bigger evil)

I'm sort of reminded of the south park movie.

They kept repeatedly getting an NC-17 from the MPAA and kept on resubmitting it (6 times) until just before release when they just relented, gave it an R and released it as-is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park:_Bigger,_Longer_%26...

Indeed. That’s my only interaction with AI coding.

Every time Visual Studio updates, it’ll turn back on the thing that shoves a ludicrously wrong, won’t even compile, not what I was in the middle of doing line of garbage code in front of my cursor, ready to autocomplete in and waste my time deleting if I touch the wrong key.

This is the thing that Microsoft thinks is important enough to be worth burning goodwill by re-enabling every few weeks, so I’m left to conclude that this is the state of the art.

Thus far I haven’t been impressed enough to make it five lines of typing before having to stop what I’m doing and google how to turn it off again.

I feel you. I totally disabled AI completions as they actually were often sidelining me from my reasoning.

It is like having an obnoxious co-worker shoving me to the side everytime i type a new line and complete a whole block of code and asking me if it is good without regards to how many times I rejected those changes.

I still use AI, but favor a copy paste flow where I at least need to look at what i am copying and locating the code I am pasting to. At least i am aware of the methods or function names and general code organization.

I also ask for small copy paste changes so that I keep it digestible. A bonus point is that ChatGPT in firefox when the context gets too big, the browser basically slowsdown locks and it works as a form extra sense that the context window is too big and LLM is about to start saying non-sense.

That said AI, is an amazing tool for prototyping and help when out of my domain of expertise.

The worse is when writing comments. I'm writing a comment such as "Doing X because..." and it never get it right.

I'm making a comment precisely because it's not obvious when reading the code, and the AI will make up some generic and completely wrong reason.

I disabled the inline auto suggestions. It’s like the tech version of that annoying person who interrupts every sentence with the wrong ending.

I really get irritated when AI is opt out. Opt out is not consent.

Agents are great (in so far the models are able to complete the task). Autocomplete copilot just feels like bad UX. It's both, not super effective and also disruptive to my thinking.

On VS you can change that to only come up if you do a key shortcut.

For those on VS, this is how to hide it, if using 17.14 or later,

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/copilot-n...

My little experience with AI coding, using copilot on Eclipse, was mixed... Context: I work with an old Java source code that uses Servlets and implements his own web framework. There is a lot of code without tests or comments.

The autocomplete, I find it useful. Specially doing menial, very automatic stuff like moving stuff when I refactor long methods. Even the suggestions of comments looks useful. However, the frequency with it jumps it's annoying. It needs to be dialed down somehow (I can only disable it). Plus, it eats the allowed autocomplete quota very quickly.

The "agent" chat. It's like tossing a coin. I find very useful when I need to write a tests for a class that don't have. At least, allows me to avoid writing the boiler player. But usually, I need to fix the mocking setup. Another case when it worked fine, it's when helped me to fix a warning that I had on a few VUE2 components. However, in other instances, I saw miserable falling to write useful code or messing very bad with the code. Our source code is in ISO8859-1 (I asked many times to migrate it to UTF8), and for some reason, sometimes Copilot agent messes the encoding and I need to manually fix all the mess.

So... The agent/chat mode, I think that could be useful, if you know in what cases it would do it ok. The autocomplete is very useful, but needs to be dialed down.

Saving misguided AI codebases is going to be quite lucrative for contract work I suspect.

A lot of non-technical people are going to get surprisingly far into their product without realising they are on a bad path.

It already happens now when a non-technical founder doesn't get a good technical hire.

The surprising thing for developers though, is how often a shit codebase makes millions of dollars before becoming an issue. As much as I love producing rock solid software, I too would take millions of dollars and a shit codebase over a salary and good code.

"...one where founders don't have to be particularly talented to hit the jackpot."

That's where we're at right now anyways.

"If tech companies are this stupid, it ought to be very easy to disrupt and usurp them by simply shipping--"

And that's how we got here.

The code rot issue will blow up a lot more over the next few years, that we can finally complete the sentence and start "shipping competing code that works".

I worry that mopping up this catastrophe is going to be a task that people will again blindly set AI upon without the deep knowledge of what exactly to do, rather than "to do in general, over there, behind that hill".

Yes this is only bad news if you are working for morons.

Unfortunately a lot of people are in that situation. You can basically forget about disruption. Meritocracy is dead, long live the Peter principle.

I once had a boss who saw me use Vim and was really impressed with how quickly I could jump around files and make precision edits. He tried getting the other devs (not many, < 5) to use Vim too but it didn't quite pan out.

I would guess that interest, passion, and motivation all play a role here. It's kind of like programming itself. If you sit people down and make them program for awhile, some will get good at it and some won't.

Coding agents seem to be in the fun paradox of "it's so easy to use, anyone can code!" and "using it productively is a deep skill, and we have to force people to use it so they learn"

Programming isn’t a government desk job. The interface between programmer and company should be the output only, they can’t force a programmer to use w/e bs they think is good at the time

And that's why performance tracking is prohibited in countries where unions still have a bit of power.

Even married people with kids can switch companies. Sometimes that implies a pay cut, but not always.

And if they really tied their livelihood to working at the same company for next decade because they maxed out their lifestyle relative to the income generated by that company, then that falls all on them and I don't actually feel that bad for them.

Easy way to game that would be to spam a couple of pages of unread documentation for every page of code you write. 2/3rds copilot usage, it's not critical, and documenting existing code is a much more likely to work use case for an LLM.

Why feel bad? They signed up for that. There is no reason to feel bad for people who enter into voluntary contracts willingly.

Personally I want my MSFT position to increase, so I’m cool with whatever the company does to increase the share price.

I don't want to wade into the actual effectiveness of RTO nor LLMs at boosting productivity, but if you buy into the claims made by advocates, it seems pretty obvious that the "in office boosts communication" claim is only true if your coworker (the other side of the conversation) is in office. Not everyone has the same priorities, so you'd have to mandate compliance to see the benefits.

Similarly, many people don't like learning new tools, and don't like changing their behavior. Especially if it's something they enjoy vs something good for the business. It's 2025 and people will have adamantly used vim for 25 years; some people aren't likely to change what they're comfortable with. Regardless of what is good for productivity (which vim may or may not be), developers are picky about their tools, and its hard to convince people to try new things.

I think the assumption that people will choose to boost their own productivity is questionable, especially in the face of their own comfort or enjoyment, and if "the business" must wait for them to explore and discover it on their own time, they risk forgoing profits associated with that employee's work.

I’m lazy. I’d rather work from home even if the office is more productive because it’s easier for me to not have to go to the office.

If the AI tools actually worked how they are marketed I’d use them because that’s less work for me to have to do. But they don’t.

There are psychological barriers to using a tool that diminishes the work you previously thought was complex.

That's assuming this is most people's objective when they are at work.

And even if it was, that's also assuming this benefit would be superior to the benefit of remote work for the individual.

It is not harder if you don't care about or even understand what could go wrong. It is harder if you care and want to be as confident of this code as if it is your own hand-written code.

Feels like you are assuming everyone has your diligence and the diligence that exists in the industry isn't already rapidly decaying due to what's happening.

Current LLMs are already trained on the entirety of the interwebs, including very likely stuff they really should not have had access to (private github repos and such).

GPT-5 and other SoTA models are only slightly better than their predecessors, and not for every problem (while being worse in other metrics).

Assuming there is no major architectural breakthrough[1], the trajectory only seems to be slowing down.

Not enough new data, new data that is LLM generated (causing a "recompressed JPEG" sort of problem), absurd compute requirements for training that are only getting more expensive. At some point you hit hard physical limits like electricity usage.

[1]: If this happens, one side effect is that local models will be more than good enough. Which in turn means all these AI companies will go under because the economics don't add up. Fun times ahead, whichever direction it goes.

If managers are pushing a clearly not-working tool, it makes perfect sense for workers to complain about this and share their experiences. This has nothing to do with the future. No one knows for sure if the models will improve or not. But they are not as advertised today and this is what people are reacting to.

In its infancy, but still forced on people like it's a mature product.

The marketing around AI as a feature complete tool ready for production is disingenuous at best, and outright fraud in many cases.