Alternative to the reject and request rewrite approach, which may not work in the corporation environment. You schedule a really long video call with the offending person, with the agenda politely describing that for such a huge and extensive change, a collaborative meeting is required. You then notify your lead that new huge task has arrived which will take X hours from you, so if he wishes to re-prioritize tasks, he is welcome. And then if the meeting happen, you literally go line by line, demanding that author explain them to you. And if explanation or a meeting are refused, you can reject RP with a clear explanation why.
This is the answer, and it has been the answer going back to the before times when we didn't have pull requests but we did in-person team code reviews before merging branches (yes, really). A massive, complicated merge without documentation and extensive support from other interested/impacted people and teams justifying things like a parser DSL? That is always going to be a problem whether AI generated it or the developer locked their office door and went on a three-day manic coding binge.
AI doesn't directly make this stuff worse, it accelerates a team's journey towards embracing engineering practices around the code being written by humans or LLMs.
I would recommend inviting the person, his manager, and your manager.
To start things off the meeting, I would say something like, "To me this is a surprising PR. I would expect it to be maybe 500(e.g.) lines including unit tests. Why does it need to be this complicated?"
If your manager just folds over, I would just accept it, because he's probably so beat down by the organization that he's not going to stick up for his employees anyway. At that point, it's time to look for another job.
But if the managers listen to their employees, and you have a better alternative, and your arguments are reasonable, it should be fine.
It doesn't even need to be a long call, just a one off "hey this is a big PR, got a sec to run me through it" works.
Usually within a few questions the answer "the AI wrote it that way" will come out.
Which feels bananas to me, like you don't understand how the code you PR is doing what you want? That would feel like showing up to work with no pants on for me.
Oh, how I would love to work with you. I'd drown you in more meetings, documentation on code (LLM generated of course) than you could ever imagine.
You can use the LLM to generate as much documentation on the changes as you want. Just give it your PR. If someone tries to reject your vibe coded AI slop, just generate more slop documentation to drown them in it. It works every time.
If they push back, report them to their manager for not being "AI first" and a team player.
If we look at this as a system with work flowing through it, the "theory of constraints" quickly tells us that code review is the bottleneck, and that speeding up code generation actually lowers system throughput.
This is not new stuff, Goldratt warned us about this twenty+ years ago.
When my manager pings me about it I'll just show him your ai slop and tell him we'll be liable for all the bugs and production issues related to this, in addition to maintaining it. Then let him make the choice. Escalate if needed.
Honestly, this approach would probably get you fired eventually for non-coop behaviour in every company I’ve worked at.
AI slop code is becoming the go-to way for a lot of written code. At some point it’ll make more sense to find a solution to the problem (“how to be confident in slop code”), rather than going against the financial motives of the business owners (cut expenses, maximize profit somehow through AI). I’m not sure if it’s right or wrong, but it is what it is.
> Honestly, this approach would probably get you fired eventually for non-coop behaviour in every company I’ve worked at
What's so non-coop in this? This huge PR is a non-coop work and it requires to be fixed. Just imagine if someone locks the work of the whole branch just to review 9000 LOC, which they even didn't wrote. It's just no-go option
And even if there would be an AI which explains what this code is doing, people wouldn't be able to check it manually in reasonable time. It just enormous piece of work. So until there is a solution to this, such PRs should be declined and rewritten
Also it seems like the worker who brought this code doesn't know how evaluate the complexity of the task relatively to the solution, so there is a question about their qualification and level
> Honestly, this approach would probably get you fired eventually for non-coop behaviour in every company I’ve worked at.
I don't think I've ever worked in a company that would fire someone for something like that. Maybe you'd get a scheduled conversation to talk about it, to try to resolve whatever is going on (in this case verbose AI slop PRs), since obviously something is going wrong when people start engaging in malicious compliance.
But then I also never worked in a country where people can be fired for whatever reason, it's always been a legal requirement (in the countries I've lived at least) that the firing needs to be properly justified and explained, and firing someone like that wouldn't be justified.
Hah, don't say that, just makes my current computer and HN obsession even more clear, I've hidden upvotes in my browser just to avoid realizing that! (jokes aside, I do probably spend too much time on HN at this moment...)
It wouldn’t be a direct firing, but if the majority of the company/team is pro-AI, people will complain privately for “being a person hard to work with”. Eventually, after 6 months of repetitive passive aggressiveness, you’ll be let go or get paycuts.
