IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Control said:

Only hobby code, so maybe not too relevant, but I've been having one model orchestrate another to check and another to fix so they basically argue amongst themselves until the orchestrator is satisfied. They eventually sort it out, but it takes forever. Generally Fable to orchestrate and swapping between Sol/GLM to review/fix. I mostly did it that way to budget/spread tokens, and it works, but probably mostly because it takes so damned long.

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That's definitely a "solution" and one my boss went to almost immediately. He's on the $200 Claude Code plan and was complaining about running out of tokens 5 days into his weekly session. I was lamenting having to ask for more(because I don't think we've solved the baggage that comes with AI) just to participate in whatever clown car of a workflow my boss is cooking up. Now I'm thinking I have more immediate counter points. Spending 90% of your feature in MR review is demoralizing.

Noodleface said:

Not my own code, but I use it for other's PRs.

I basically point my agent at their branch and ask it to do a code review on it (and provide no context). I then look at what it recommends and verify for myself. Anything I think is worthy, I comment in the PR or ask questions about.

What I HATE is this guy on my team that does it and just copies and pastes the diarrhea Claude spits out (like 10 paragraphs worth) with no human interpretation behind it. Like I said, this is how old heads are using it. It's essentially useless and I always ignore it if people do that.

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Can you tell the difference if someone had already done an AI review on their code? If not, doesn't that imply you should review your own code similarly? If you can, do you toss the review away as it's potentially already into garbage territory?

I've definitely done what your teammate has done. Partly because it's easy and partly because my boss was doing it, so...I guess that's what we do now. Thanks for reminding me, I'm going to stop doing that, I like your methodology better.

Claude's verboseness has definitely been an issue on my team. Some people don't like how much reading it entails. If you don't put any leashes on it, the MR descriptions, commit messages, thread comments, and code comments can be gigantic.

Another problem is that it can seem insincere. During a team discussion on this topic, one of my MRs was used as an example. My boss started 9 threads, each at least 4 paragraphs long, took me all afternoon to respond and fix those threads. People thought the review was insincere because it was obviously written by AI. My boss said he spent 4 hours chatting with the AI before filing each thread.