@wwahammy At work, I had to do code review on some claude code output for writing some e2e tests in Playwright.

I looked at the PR initially, realized it was all AI generated, saw how unbelievably repetitive it was, and just left a comment suggesting we think very carefully before merging it because it looked like automated tech debt.

3 rounds of review of code from a guy whom I have never had to give much push back on basically ever cuz he had good principles, and it was finally in a state where it would be “acceptable”

The crux of it is yeah it cranked out like 40 tests!

30 of them should have just been definitions that were passed through into a single test method with light abstraction and basically just feeding am array of test variables into.

If 1 thing updated, ALL of the tests would have to be individually updated vs just updating the 1 method.

I also had to nudge to make changes so that it will run through every test case and not fail the whole suite if just the 1 test failed.

And this is just within an SDET type setting!

One of the senior devs has been doing an unfortunate amount of vibe coding and the weird issues that keep coming up have been really bizarre. I catch a lot of them but there is so much that I am certain I won’t be able to catch in advance due to systemic issues in the org’s testing capabilities. It is a really stressful time to be in QA rn and I need this bubble to pop and the phantasms of GenAI to fall from people’s eyes so we can build shit people actually want.

All this to say: You are completely right and sitting on the other side of vibe code and told to validate it has been so very stressful.

@dvandal @wwahammy Definitely seeing some of the same in my work.

It seems like (Not surprisingly) lowering the cost (Time, cognitive, whatever) of generating more lines of code, is that more of the people I work with are perfectly content to ship “brute force” code instead of spending 5 minutes considering any abstraction that would lower line count.

@dvandal @wwahammy Just today, I was reviewing a code change where a coworker was changing ~50 instances of a magic number from value x to value y.

I had the gall to suggest we might want to abstract the value into a constant or something, and just change it once.

And this is from seasoned engineers, not someone fresh out of school.

I don’t look forward to fixing this shit for the next decade.

@philip @wwahammy architecture, design, patterns, DRY, etc. are all where the work of software development is.
Coding isn’t the hard part, it is just the vehicle and tooling to “build the building”.

Mediocre and difficult to maintain code like this can only last so long as the tokens are subsidized with stupid money, and it will (arguably has) single handedly delay technological progress as a whole until stupid money gets smart.