I struggle to review a 1k line change. When people give me such big changes I normally don’t believe they’ve reviewed them either.
That’s because they haven’t.
Mystery solved!
Try working on a codebase that’s all event-driven hexagonal CQRS with hand-crafted SQL for persistence. Add additional buzzwordy methodologies to taste.
Adding a single property to your product means you now have to update an aggregate class, several DTOs, and several event classes and handlers before you can even think about touching the UI.
And that’s in your main solution. There’s also at least one facade service you’ll need to make compatible and you also need to update the event simulator used for testing. The latter night involve having to touch every single line in a 2000 lines long SQL script.
Having to go though three separate 600-2000 LOC PRs for one PBI isn’t that exotic.
forgive them lord, for they know not what they do
Lord, I wish they knew what they do
Occasionally I do that…but only because 500 of those lines are my comments explaining everything.
Please don’t explain that much, make your code easier to understand.
I’m aware. Not always feasible. For example, had to add a custom video capture solution that captures the last 30 seconds of a process for crash handling purposes.
You most definitely need to do add that much comments explaining the mp4 box format along with the box “hierarchy” of what is being written. Add to that MFT (h264 encode) code…
Basically, if anything, the comments are for me for when I look back at that code.
had to add a custom video capture solution that captures the last 30 seconds of a process for crash handling purposes.
Commanded from above? This smells like a noob idea.
I have no idea what your response even means/is getting at.
This is my attempt to translate: You had to add a feature like that ? Must have been an order from your boss. That seems like a feature someone rather inexperienced and unknowledgeable would request.
- Legal has issues with using existing libraries (including MIT). Definitely idiotic, but I can’t control that.
- Idea was mine.
- Subprocess that captures parent process active video with a rolling buffer for crash handling purposes is absolutely necessary when trying to reproduce issues in development (Gamedev editor). If you think associating the last 15s prior to a crash with a mindump isn’t helpful for debugging, I don’t know what to tell you.
The problem with Claude is that it doesn’t write code to be modular & reusable. Every tiny change requires a complete rewrite.
well, that depends entirely on your prompt/process, it can be done
With enough seniour developer’s time and dedication you can spend days and enough water to flood a town, so you can badly maybe do something that a junior dev can do already (your shit will still be worse). If that’s not an achievement of a modern technology I don’t know what is.
Just more prompting will do + make no mistake
unironically, a better prompt does yield better results - shocking, I know
Unironically Claude (or whatever you use) will almost always deliver code that is shit, it’s just less shit if you prompt it better, LLMs are good to make short snippets if you get stuck tho; And remember to fucking check what the code is and rewrite bad shit
I’ve seen plenty of code in my life, from humans and AI.
For the past year or so, these agents can code just fine most of the time, as long as they are given enough context (or have the tools to get it). Regardless of how many downvotes I get here, they really are capable of generating decent code. I’m sorry you couldn’t make it work yet.
I’ve seen too as I have to review it. AI produces very professionally looking bad code.
It is so weird to explain, but that’s basically what I see.
Before LLM I could immediately tell someone’s code is crap, now I have to spend a lot of time trying to understand what it does to reach the same conclusion.
My honest opinion is that it’s bad because a lot of people using LLMs have no standards and push the first thing that seems to work. Be mad at who’s at the driving wheel, not the car.
You absolutely can generate crap with agents/LLMs, and like a humans writing, the first draft will probably be subpar or maybe complete garbage. Every new session is a clean slate, that’s why putting effort in the documents guiding it is so important.
But AI bad and human code is so awesome! Better downvote. But seriously, there are people here saying that LLMs can not add anything of value in any way. About as delusional as Republicans.
Repeat after me: “Rejected. Reason: too large of a change for one PR.”
Don’t worry half of those will be useless code comments
// Here I'm not using that other thing that is now completely irrelevant, but I'll leave a comment to the non-existing thing anyway because I'm avoiding it.REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
The comment:
# This code does exactly what you asked: Never change state, only fetch the state and return the difference
the code: hallucinated database table drops
LBTM, rejected instantly.
We’ve had a very recent uptick in engineers submitting PRs of hundreds of lines across multiple files, for Jira tickets that only asked for a one-line change. The engineers involved have been using AI assistants for nearly two years now, but there seems to have been a change in the last month or so in how aggressive the new models are at changing code.
Almost as if they’re paid by the token…
This is exacty what I’m seeing. I’ve been using it in a DevOps capacity to act on runbooks. The same wrote task 3 months ago now consume 4-5x more tokens. this correlated closely with when anthropic released auto mode.
2 years and they still don’t know how to prompt…
I mean, I don’t know how to prompt. Mostly because I don’t use AI to code.
deleted by creator
The review process is all wrong if something like this is ever on the table as a single PR*.
Big changes like this were made before, and knowing how to split the work (or at least trying to work it out) used to be part of the job.
Hopefully, strong unions and worker involvement can remedy this, given we change our work culture to be closer to what projects like SQLITE and FFMPEG have (noting, of course, the fact these are FOSS, and made by volunteers, yet are very dependable), slower and stable development cycle that prioritizes high quality work that people can actually depend on and trust.
- As in one single PR you’re expected to read, instead of one backed by tests and the like.
> 1k lines = LGTM
> 1k lines in internal tool = idc, do what you want.
> 1k lines in critical path = lol no.
Who cares? It’s company code. They want AI, they get AI 🤷
I get the blame and I have not lined a new remote job yet. So there.
Jeez. Now I feel bad. I’ve been working on a project with some new people, and I’ve never used Github before. I’m still learning the etiquette.
I made a branch, and spent a month viciously hunting every bug I could find. I don’t trust AI, so I was doing it all by hand. Dawn to dusk, I was staring at code and typing like I had a fever and the only cure was figuring out where tf that invalid scope is supposed to go.
This is my first real project with other people, so of course I’m so proud when I send the PR and it has 40,000 lines added and 60,000 lines removed. I worked really hard on it, and it sorely needed the update.
It was almost all bug fixes, the actual new stuff was about 1,000 or so lines. But what should I do in the future? I don’t wanna be an asshole, I wanna be helpful.
pro tip for next time : make multiple smaller PR.
Generally it’s more considerate to submit smaller batches of (self-contained!) work at a time. Sometimes the work or existing code is so interconnected that this can’t really be done, though. You mentioned spending a month, that’s also a long time in most environments to be off working on bulk changes for later review. A week is probably long enough in most cases, some orgs even prefer to push (if not review) code daily.
Don’t agonize over it though, wanting to improve your impact on others while working is the right direction to point, keep walking that way and you’ll do awesome, let it develop over time. As in, don’t let your desire for politeness slow down your work or growth too much (I do this lol, why I’m mentioning).
I’ll try to keep that in mind. What do I do the next time I’m working on a very long branch? The next big project to do on this thing is fixing the myriad localization issues that have been plaguing this project, and that’ll mean pruning maybe thousands of lines. Merging my fixes to the main branch was apparently a nightmare (I’ve already apologized. Profusely. And haven’t done it again.)
Should I just try to get as much work done in as few commits as possible?
First off, don’t sweat it, the “nightmare” was probably 20-30 annoying minutes for the senior.
But commit count isn’t what would’ve made it tough to merge, and strictly speaking smaller commits is typically better.
Concretely: limit the kinds and the reach of changes you’re asking someone to review & merge. I’ve never done localization but I’ll try to guess for an example -
1000 lines changed because you’re replacing an incorrect punctuation character misused everywhere - that’s really only one change to have to think about, it’s 1000 lines but one fairly trivial change.
Now, if each of those lines was improving some phrasing, done by a native speaker that found existing phrasing clunky for their language? Well, each of those are their own judgment call and have to be assessed individually. A thousand fairly subtle changes, and a PR isn’t meant to accept some and reject others.
More abstractly, try to put yourself in the reviewer’s shoes (hard when new) - how much stuff do they have to keep in mind in order to make judgment calls about this whole batch of code?
More if you want it:
spoiler
Moving on from localization, ask yourself, how many “places” in the codebase does your code touch? Are you lumping every single possible thing into a single change set because it feels like a single feature, when it could have been architecturally segmented? Like sure a single PR for a single overall feature makes sense conceptually, but can it be split? Your skill with splitting up tasks is like 70% of your skill as an engineer over time, btw.
So for example, single feature - all code and PR for DB models, separate PR for API updates, separate PR for UI updates. One feature but the UI folks don’t have to think about the other parts, etc. Maybe the ideal case is obvious.
There are always complicating factors. Some tasks aren’t well suited to that segmentation and really require big far reaching changes. Some codebases (bad ones) make it impossible to change one part without touching ~all of it.
When you’re starting out, doing this reliably well requires seniors scoping out tasks properly so that they are developed (and then reviewed) in a sensible, segmented way.
This is extremely helpful, thank you so much.
deleted by creator
LGTM
Let’s Gamble, Try Merging is my favourite
Our PR checks auto reject the PR if it has 1k changes
is it auto reject, or just doesn’t auto approve and leaves it open for manual review
It seems weird that you can’t do a pr at all with 1000 line changes, any moderate size feature addition could hit that mark
Yeah, 1k is kinda a small limit but I get the logic, you can almost always break changes into smaller increments and not mass merge a mega PR that’s hard to review
You know, you could just chunk it up in a way to keep it readable.
for a new feature request? a PR isn’t a commit, it’s a set of commits which would add to the line change amount.
Like even if you spread it out across 20 or 30 commits that’s still going to be the same line count.
I guess you could push not yet functional or used code to lessen the line count change, but that seems in bad taste. I’ve always gone off the working repo should always be in build or clean state and a push or commit shouldn’t break that.
I work in a Scrum team and we implement features iteratively, so we start with the minimal feature, merge it, get feedback, and go on from there.
At work there’s no excuse to keep a feature in a stale branch until you accumulate 1000 lines of code change.
Stupid question, but what happens to a rejected PR? Because features get built for a reason (there’s usually a Ticket/Story for the feature that the PR adds) so do those just get closed? Or does the person have to re-write the code entirely?
I know in my team, the most I could do is tell the coworker to self-review while keeping the PR open until they change some stuff. I have never rejected a PR before because no matter how bad a PR is, it always is technically necessary for the feature.
If a feature request requires changes of such a magnitude it is important to break them down into smaller chunks that can be reviewed either independently or sequentially.
I have never rejected a PR before because no matter how bad a PR is, it always is technically necessary for the feature.
Define bad? If the PR contains lots of unnecessary changes such as formatting or renaming simply tell the person to roll them back and come again unless they have very good reason to do so.
If the code quality is bad, well, that’s why you are doing the review. If all that matters was “Does it do what it is supposed to do most of the time?” some simple unit tests would be enough. Reviewing code means making sure it does what is supposed to do and does so in an acceptable manner. Criteria can be amongst others speed, security, ease of use or maintainability.
- Insecure handling of inputs? Add sanitisation and resubmit.
- Overusage of resource intensive features such as database queries? Group and optimize queries and resubmit.
- The codes formatting is not according to the internal style guide? Configure your damn linter and resubmit.
- …
If you don’t want to close PRs outright you can request new commits that fix the issues you identified, reevaluate the PR and decide again.
No
You ask your LLM of choice to look it over, completing the shit-cycle
I fully expect this to become the new normal being pushed by management.
“We identified PR reviews to be blocking our newfound AI-powered efficiency, so we are now mandating all the reviews to done by AI. Also we figured all the developers are now useless since all you do is ask Claude to solve tickets, so you are all fired”
I wonder how long it takes for the first high profile disaster happening because of a policy like that.
Yep.
We have one PR still blocked. Last change is a simple comment from me “Why ?”
The most important question that every change must answer.
Merge that shit, watch it all collapse, enjoy your forever holiday
“So, Daywim. Why did you let this obviously aweful PR pass your desk causing so much trouble for our company? I’m afraid we have to let you go because of this questionable performance.” - Corporate
“Looks like I overlooked something in this 6k PR full of im meaningless dribble. Why don’t you ask the person who comitted the code how he overlooked this bug. Its his respinsibility”
Just throw the the slop creator under the bus.
If you’re the reviewer you share responsibility if there’s an issue with the PR. Hopefully your teams culture is such that issues like that are treated as a learning experience, rather than a reason to pile on the individuals involved.
If you have someone on your team that creates 6k PRs with AI then you are in a loose-loose situation anyways. If you do a thorough review you will be done just in time for the next one and you will get in trouble for not getting your own shit done. So gambling on the PR is probably your best shot at survival.
If it can’t be sensibly be reviewed, reject it for that reason. Have them, or their agent, break it down into smaller, self contained, PRs.
Just don’t approve it? If they complain, they don’t have a leg to stand on.
Throw them under the bus by rejecting their PR. Integrity is your responsibility, the gesture is theirs. They’ll get shit for not getting their stuff done.
What part of forever holiday did you miss?
I interpreted it as “Holiday that lasts forever because the company can’t work anymore” but I guess it is meant to mean “Holiday that lasts forever cause you got fired”?
This is why I have my agent do a “cleanup” pass to trim down as much redundancy as possible, tidy up the comments, and so forth. Ideally break the change into several independent changelists,
This one weird trick will blow your mind: Just add “do it correctly” to your prompt!
That doesn’t work so well since it leaves all the old context in place. The point of doing a separate cleanup pass is to get the AI to look at it all holistically with “fresh eyes”.
I guess this is a humor community, though, so practical advice is getting downvoted. Um… bazinga? That usually triggers the laugh track.
That’s an automatic reject from me, that’s not a patch, it’s an overhaul
Same. I don’t care too much about you using Ai but I will not tolerate your bad code and bad coding practices. I don’t care if it’s human or machine made. If you don’t make a fully sanctioned rewrite then this goes straight to the bin.
If LLM can make big PR, LLM can split PRs
The goal of AI providers is to make humans unable to maintain code, so you have to rely on their expensive subscriptions and tokens.
