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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
… 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)_/¯
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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