zthrowaway2 hours ago
Can definitely attest to this. The frequency of outages at my company have increased drastically the past year, especially ever since incorporating agentic development. I’m seeing all of the dev best practices go out the window. We have a few vibe coders that are posting 15-30 PR’s per day. It’s way too much for us to review. We’re not a big shop. I think we’re going to have to hire more people just to review code across the industry. And those people will have to know how to actually write software otherwise what are they even reviewing. Maybe the models will get so good they never make a mistake. Doubt it.
pants22 hours ago
I really think that software in general is getting buggier, with ChatGPT/Claude being some of the buggiest software I use. I constantly run into quality issues there and I've reported at least a dozen bugs to ChatGPT this year. One kicker I found recently was that Codex PR Reviews, once turned on for a repo, cannot be turned off - I got escalated to engineering who confirmed that they forgot to add a feature to disable code reviews.
bensyverson2 hours ago
I wonder if the PR workflow is just unsustainable in the agentic era. Rather than review every new feature or bug fix, we would depend on good test coverage, and hold developers accountable for what they ship.
The result might be more faulty code getting merged, but if you already have outages and can't review every PR, is there currently a meaningful benefit to the PR workflow?
dwattttt2 hours ago
This is the "if you're already letting faults through, why not give up trying to stop faults?" approach.
bensyverson2 hours ago
The alternative might be "what if we could get the genie back into the bottle?"
We know some people are using LLMs to evaluate PRs, the only question is who, and how strong the incentive is for them to give up.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF2 hours ago
Diogenes carrying a lamp, looking for good test coverage
PradeetPatel2 hours ago
The proposed industry solution is to use agents to review PRs, as not to slow down the velocity of delivery...
My current workplace is going through a major "realignment" exercise to replace as many testers with agents as humanely possible, which proved to be a challenge when the existing process is not well documented.
lopsotronican hour ago
The fact that anyone in leadership would ever think this is even remotely possible - given my experience in the general state of requirements / contracts / integrations / support - makes me bleed from my earholes just a little bit.
It's starting to just feel a little like an excuse to call everyone on deck for "a few weeks trying 9-9-6". But even then the lack of traction isn't between the eyeballs and the deployment. You'll still be spinning wheels in that slippery stuff between what a customer is thinking and what the iron they bought is doing.
ryan_n2 hours ago
So you essentially trust the output of the model from beginning to end? Curious to know what type of application you're building where you can safely do that.
Edit: to clarify, I know these models have gotten significantly better. The output is pretty incredible sometimes, but trusting it end to end like that just seems super risky still.
ricketycricket2 hours ago
"Hey Claude, did Claude do a good job?"
sgarlandan hour ago
I did an experiment today, where I had a new Claude agent review the work of a former Claude agent - both Opus 4.6 - on a large refactor on a 16k LOC project. I had it address all issues it found, then I cleared context, and repeated. Rinse and repeat. It took 4 iterations before it approached nitpicking. The fact that each agent found new, legitimate problems that the last one had missed was concerning to me. Why can’t it find all of them at once?
sharts2 hours ago
Maybe it’s time to have multiple agents and models review the PRs and also provide context for easier human review. That and lots more focus on robust testing.
There’s no way velocity will decrease now that upper management is obsessed with AI.
Madmallard2 hours ago
Sounds like people need to speak up to management
storus11 minutes ago
Management wants to get rid of people; they want to have their "wish-machine" that does what they say without any need to deal with nerds or ethical issues.
strange_quarkan hour ago
Management doesn’t care. This sort of thing is becoming more common at my workplace too. More outages, more embarrassing bugs, even bugs that leak customer data. The solution is always more AI, and if you’re still shipping bugs and causing outages, it’s because you did’t use the AI correctly. Leadership makes all the right noises about quality and ownership, but when it comes down to it, the incentive structures clearly prioritize shipping things faster, all else be damned.
zthrowawayan hour ago
Management likes how fast features are getting deployed so they essentially told us to just deal with it.
teaearlgraycold2 hours ago
People pushing dozens of PRs per day need to learn to prioritize tasks, and balance a bit more towards quality over quantity.
sublinearan hour ago
This is the way. There's nothing inherently wrong with using AI as long as it's used responsibly.
I highly doubt there are any managers or executives who care how AI is precisely used as long as there are positive results. I would argue that this is indeed an engineering problem, not an upper management one.
What's missing is a realistic discussion about this problem online. We instead see insanely reckless people bragging about how fast they drove their pile of shit startup directly into the ground, or people in denial loudly banging drums to resist all forms of AI.
morkalork2 hours ago
And maybe spend some time doing reviews for other developers. And if they aren't qualified to be, then maybe spend that time becoming qualified rather than pumping out more slop.
ok_dad2 hours ago
I love it. I was getting burnt out due to ADHD or autism burnout but with AI tooling I’m able to work a full week without burnout. I think the kind of burnout I get is helped with these tools, but since I’m not neurotypical it’s different from the burnout people are getting from doing too much.
I do see “task expansion” happening often though. If I can do the full feature rather than doing baby steps I’ll often do that now, because wrangling code is easier.
solomatov2 hours ago
Is there any publication which demonstrates that the improvement is really 10x?
ggm2 hours ago
It's like "decimate" -you would think 10x had literal force, but it's more figurative. It just means "moar"
(decimate had specific literal intent. Now it's just a force modifier like bigly)
peterashford2 hours ago
The literal meaning was removing 1/10
nemosaltat2 hours ago
> Removing 1/10
feels euphemistic for the original “colloquial” usage I have for it.
> The killing of one in ten, chosen by lots, from a rebellious city or a mutinous army was a punishment sometimes used by the Romans. The word has been used (loosely and unetymologically, to the irritation of pedants) since 1660s for "destroy a large but indefinite number of." [0]
zetanor2 hours ago
A watched pot never boils. A watched vibe coder never 10x-es.
hgoel2 hours ago
Using vibe coding for frequent PRs seems insanely reckless.
In my scientific computing environment, the majority of my vibe coded output goes to one-off scripts, stuff that is not worth committing (correcting outputs, one-off visualizations, consistency checks), and anything worth committing gets further refined to an extent that it pretty much can't be considered vibe coded anymore. It's simply too risky, any bugs would propagate down to decision making for designing new, expensive instruments.
I imagine that the cost and trust risks in enterprise environments are similar, so this seems very reckless.
AI Agents have helped up my productivity, but that's specifically because I can focus on the science, and delegate the auxiliary things to AI. I also believe I get this productivity out of them because my supervisor really drove home how hard I need to go on consistency checks and years of having my visualizations nitpicked (so I am able to do the same to AI and recognize when results are suspicious).
stackskipton2 hours ago
Most people don't care. Leadership is demanding feature, feature, feature. IC are worried about losing their jobs and outages rarely cost most business actual money. So garbage gets shipped, outages rise, everyone is burned out but since they can't find another job, they remain.
chiian hour ago
In this situation, you raise the issue with management, with a paper trail that Cover Your Ass, that the pace is unsustainable and bugs will continue to accumulate faster than it can be fixed. Make sure that you are not responsible for it and ensure this is known by all (including management).
You then continue to vibe code as instructed by management. No burnout because you are not responsible anymore.
stackskiptona minute ago
People still get burnout if not from constant pages, the late nights and worry about their job.
teaearlgraycold2 hours ago
I love vibe coding for little tools like that. Tools which can have their outputs quickly validated, and then throw them away. Like a jig in woodworking.
aetherspawn2 hours ago
… how are you getting actual usable output at that scale? I have to baby my AI in 1 minute increments or it just doesn’t arrive at the correct solution at all.
Using Codex 5.2
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wfme2 hours ago
Perhaps the prompts you are using could do with some love. We're pretty consistently getting great results up to and beyond the 10 minute mark in a large monorepo.
We tend to use Opus 4.6 High and GPT 5.4 High.
strange_quark2 hours ago
I mean, why do you think people are burning out?
ed_balls2 hours ago
Due to prolonged stress, which lack of control is the main contributor e.g. you have expectations, you cannot control variable x,y,z, which leads to stress, which over long period of causes burn out.
strange_quarkan hour ago
In case it wasn’t obvious, I was being facetious. You can’t just let the AI rip without putting effort into constructing good input and verifying the output and expect anything good to happen, which is what the gp was asking.
There’s no secret into how people are getting “10x”, or at least claiming to, they’re just working more.
TuringNYC2 hours ago
I can attest to this. Ultimately I dont think it is possible to 10x output systems with AI and actually keep the traditional quality controls (yet.)
IMHO you just need two stacks -- systems where you can play fast and loose and 10x output. And systems where quality matters where you can perhaps 1.5 or 2x. That is still a lot of output.
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aanet2 hours ago
I feel this is not discussed enough. I can attest to this 100%.
Just the past weekend, I was talking with a very senior engineer (~distinguished engineer at a very large tech co) who basically said he's working 8-8-6 (8 am - 8 pm, 6 days/week), "writing code" (more like supervising 8-15 agents) for a product demo in 2 weeks, which otherwise would have taken at least 1 quarter's worth of time with a small team. He's zonked out, fwiw. There are no junior engineers in the team ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, most having been laid off a few months ago.
The toll it takes, and the expectations of AI-driven productivity, have only increased dramatically. At some point, the reality will hit the remaining engg team. Not sure if the company or its leadership realizes, but so far, it's all-AI, all-the-time, human cost of productivity be damned.
strange_quark2 hours ago
If if this person really is a distinguished engineer, then they are part of leadership and it's their responsibility to set realistic expectations. Leadership knows this, they just don't care and won't care until the job market improves.
solomatov2 hours ago
> more like supervising 8-15 agents
How do they do it? (My own record is 5 agents, but it is not typical). Do they use gastown or something?
azinman22 hours ago
I often have 10+ running in parallel. I’m attacking parallel problems that aren’t interdependent. Sometimes adding additional products can bring me up to 15+.
Gotta have really good test harnesses so they can largely fix themselves.
solomatov2 hours ago
But how do you cover such amount of multi tasking? Could you give an example? I mean what kind of tasks allow such a parallelization?
htrp2 hours ago
context switching across the entirety of the feature surface for an app
You could easily have agents to work on login page, messaging feature, database/data model update, recommender system, backend api, etc
solomatov2 hours ago
But you have to keep it in your head, and remember all stuff at the same time. How is it possible to track, and do reviews one after another? Or are these pretty long running agents?
jondwillis2 hours ago
We have our doubts about this. Can you share your code or product? Anecdotally, my mistakes and lack of understanding exponentiate the more I try to parallelize.
aanetan hour ago
Honestly, I dont know. I could be mistaken about the exact number of agents - but not wrong about fact of AI-driven workflows which is heavily automated, and goes on for hours.
He's one (small) step from distinguished engineer, with 20+ patents to his name, and is an embedded programmer (largely C/C++) with 30+ years of experience in the field; and I've known him for nearly as long, so I put a lot of credence to his words.
But we don't usually talk work; he's the guitarist in our band :) [I'm the bass] So we mainly chill over music + beer. And lately, it's been less chill ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
rvz2 hours ago
> The industry calls this “10x productivity.” I call it what it is: a system that generates output at machine speed and forces humans to process it at biological speed.
The question is can you tolerate the amount of PRs thrown at you per day on top of reviewing the exponentially growing mess of code that continues to double every hour and being paid less for it.
Just learn to say no and leave. Why do you tolerate the increasing comprehension debt that is loaded on to you.
You will never get that time back. Just give it to someone else that thinks it is worth maintaining that slop for less.
basilgohar2 hours ago
The job market under our Great Leader has taken away a lot of this agency. Software engineers have gone from having the pick of the market for themselves to becoming (perceived as) next to disposable.
spaqin29 minutes ago
That's a very American-centric point of view; the job market worldwide for developers is getting tougher and tougher.
kakacik2 hours ago
Somebody doesnt know how to regulate their pace, and then various burnout symptoms happen.
Not everybody pushes themselves like that, nor should, its anything but healthy and sustainable. In my experience it takes... rather obsessed people, ocd or similar traits, maybe 2 out of 10 intensity of their disease. Highly functional, smart, yet unbalanced.
Llms just allow this spiral to go further, while human limits remain the same. Each of us creates our own path, dont mess it up just because you can. Your employer doesnt care much about you at the end, just another cog in machine but health once damaged may not bounce back, ever
onemoresoop2 hours ago
And sometimes they do build interesting things but also leave a trail of destruction behind them. It reminds me of ‘moving fast break things’.
sumeno2 hours ago
Given the research cited in the article it seems bigger than an anecdote about one guy who doesn't know how to do work life balance
70%+ saying that AI has increased their workload AND that they are burning out because is it.
mynameisash2 hours ago
Yeah, it's all well and good to say somebody doesn't know how to regulate their pace, and it's another thing for your manager to tell your team that you need to be using a squad of agents constantly. To have a weekly stand-up that is specifically and solely for the purpose of talking about your "AI wins" for the week. To be told that you will be evaluated on how much you're using AI for your job.
When your manager and your company regulate your pace for you with the understood threat that not using AI will risk your job, you don't really have much of an option.
gdulli2 hours ago
That sounds horrible. I'm so glad I saved enough money to retire early right before this madness started.
robbrown4512 hours ago
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vomayank2 hours ago
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