That is exactly what they are doing, yes
Also one engineer is treating the code as assembly. I've asked some pointed questions about code in his PR and the response was "yeah, I don't know that's what the agent did".
Edit:
To everyone freaking out about the second guy. Yeah, I think being unable to answer questions about the code you're PRing is ill advised. But requirement gathering, codebase untangling, and acceptance testing are all nontrivial tasks that surround code gen. I'm a bit surprised that having random change sets slurped up into someone else's rubber stamped PR isnt the thing that people are put off by.
But it's like a kid running a lemonade stand. Total DIY weekend project quality stuff that they are demanding go live. Hardcoded credentials, no concept of dev/qa/prod environments, no logging, no tests, no source control.
I'm not really sure teaching basic SWE practices / SDLC / system design to people whose day job is like.. accounting makes sense compared to just accelerating developer productivity.
Bringing code does not help, but a validated user story with flow diagrams, a UI suggestion, and a valid ticket could. That’s the bridge to gap.
Were I that CTO I’d explain that code carries liability, SWEs can end up in jail for malfeasance, fines, penalties, and lawsuits are what awaits us for eff-ups. “Coders” get fired if their code doesn’t work. Same speech to the devs, do exactly as much unsolicited Accounting as you wanna get fired for. Talk fences, good neighbours.
It’s not like AI is the first time this happened. CI/CD and extensive preflight and integration and canary testing is also a way of saving engineer time and improving throughput at the cost of latency and compute resources. This is just moving up the semantic stack.
Obviously as engineers we say “awesome more features and products!” but management says “awesome fewer engineers!” either way pasting the ticket in and letting a machine do the work for a fraction of the cost was the right choice. There’s no John Henry award.
If it were producing equivalent outcomes, sure. So far I haven't personally seeing strong evidence for that. LLMs do write code pretty competently at this point, but actually solving the correct problem, and without introducing unintended consequences, is a different matter entirely
If you're not doing the design of the solutions for problems as an engineer or at least making the decisions and owning the maintenance of that architecture/design, what even is your job at that point?
Unfortunately the people who offload the work of understanding and interacting with tickets just end up offloading the consequences to everyone else who has to do extra work to make sure their LLM understands the task, review the work to make sure they built the right thing, and on and on.
The same thing happens when people start sending AI bots to attend meetings: The person freed up their own time, but now everyone else has to work hard to make sure their AI bot gets the right message to them and follow up to make sure what was supposed to happen in the meeting gets to them.
I can do so much more with my spare time now. I throw agents at problems and get way more done.
$1k in tokens every day is easy to hit.
