this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
396 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
84222 readers
3387 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Fun story from this week, we had a chore for the frontend to refresh to a new version of the UI framework. Fairly simple task, so off to a junior developer. Within a couple hours there was a merge request ready to go. Ok, a fairly normal amount of time to change version and at least do a sniff test and find nothing changed so I go in assuming I'll look at a few version bumps, maybe one or two tweaks... I see the junior dev was proposing over 1,000 lines of code to be added... WTF...
I crack it open and there was just a firehose of css rules, all marked '!important'. Looking at one examlpe, it repeated the same classifier with the same exact bunch of rules 5 times in a row. It was like it found every possible derived css class combination with tag and defined !important CSS for most everything about it.
So I find out that the junior dev asked it to rebase and it did what he expected, just change some version and went. He tried it and due to a framework change, one element was misaligned by a little bit. So he gave the feedback to the LLM and tried again... and it failed, and he tried again and it failed and after 5 rounds, it finally got the element aligned and hit 'merge request'. For fun I opened up his proposed change and just so much was just a bit dodgy css wise because it screwed with so much stuff, but the junior dev only concerned himself with the page as it opened.
So I said screw it, I'll do it myself, and added the singular rule that was needed to adapt to the framework change, making it overall about a 5 line change including versioning and such.
Depressingly, I suspect an executive would consider me far less productive because I only did 5 lines of change and the junior dev would have done thousands...
Yup. AI might, and I mean might, be a force multiplier for senior developers but this whole "Everyone can just let AI code" is bullshit that will lead to a giant mess of unmanageable code when your developers your maturing don't understand the underlying code or good software architecture.
Oh and also I'm right there with you with the fuck that whole ELOC bullshit as a metric.
In my experience, the bigger the codebase gets, the more confounded LLM gets at trying to make coherent changes. So LLM projects start on shaky ground and just get worse because they can't maintain the stuff they themselves generated.
I've seen what LLM can do and it is certainly interesting and can do some stuff, but the vast majority of my experience is someone who had not coded before "vibing" themselves into a corner and demanding help to dig them out. A bit irritating because while before we could reasonably prioritize requests to do stuff because management understood making something from nothing was real work, now management says "they aren't asking you to make something, just help them fix something that already exists, should be easy!"
On the ELOC metric, for a long time I pointed out how disastrous I must be because my contribution to a project I was on was about -10,000 lines of code by the time I went to something else.