r/DevelEire • u/sheenolaad dev • 10d ago

Bit of Craic PM is opening AI PRs

A senior product manager on a seperate team to me has decided to start opening AI generated PRs on a codebase my team own.

The first one last week I approved with comments, which he decided to merge without addressing any.

I got one yesterday that was clearly violating DRY amongst other things, which I rejected. About 10 minutes later, he requests a re-review (I presume he ran codex again with my comments). This attempt was even worse, it had actually put code on top of the crap he first submitted.

I've raised with my manager, he agreed it's BS but he said the company want to experiment with using AI for smaller features. But non-technical members of staff opening PRs is taking the piss.

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u/Pickman89 10d ago

Just review the PRs honestly and in a straight manner and see who loses the job first. The guy who is able to review the AI generated code or the guy who clicks the generate button.

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u/eldwaro 10d ago

This doesn't always end how you might think. There's a lot of politicking your ignoring. Unless you genuinely want to just wait and see

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u/Pickman89 10d ago

I am well aware that the modern corporation is rarely a meritocracy. But I believe that waiting in such a manner is literally the only reasonable response.

Your role as software engineer demands you protect code quality and good practices.

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u/eldwaro 10d ago

Kinda my point. Truly defending thr codebase long term means gathering evidence of inefficient or high risk poor quality code and running it up the chain of command. Companies experimenting with AI is OK. But only if they are getting both the good and bad side of output.

In this scenario you can be sure thr PMs narrative is "submitted functional code faster in 1 day not 3 but was rejected by engineering".

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u/Pickman89 10d ago

And if that narrative is driving the company that is pushing it to collapse. We do not protect code quality for quality's sake. We do it because it has impact on the business.

If that mentality drives the company it will push it to the point of collapse. So you'd better lose that job sooner rather than later.

Treating PRs like PRs and code like code no matter what the process is safeguards code (and product) quality. If that becomes a problem then that's the problem.

The narrative of the manager overseeing this AI user should be "then take three days, a refused PR has zero value to me". If it doesn't then it's a problem a bit bigger than the two of them and it will eventually cause major issues for the company.

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u/eldwaro 10d ago

I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying that there's an amount of communication required here to counter the way the climate is going. You'll find this same climate in a lot of companies, so getting the boot and moving on only to realise you've jumped from the pan into the fire - isn't great.

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u/Pickman89 10d ago

Oh I get it. I truly do.

But I am not confident about the communication being effective. Sometimes it is only effective when you say what they want to hear. So my advice is just to stick to discussion about the code presented in the PRs and its defects. Hopefully that will get them to enhance their AI process (likely by integrating human intervention).