I have received a few LLM produced PRs from peers from adjacent teams, in good faith but not familiar with the project, and they increasingly infuriate me. They were all garbage, but there’s a great asymmetry: it costs my peers nothing to generate them, it costs me precious time to refute them. And what can I do really? Saying “it’s irreparable garbage because the syntax might be right but it’s conceptually nonsense” but that’s not the most constructive take.

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esperent 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

You could use an LLM to give you advice on how to present that take in a more constructive manner.

Partially sarcastic but I do personally use LLMs to guide my communication in very limited cases:

1. It's purely business related, and

2. I'm feeling too emotionally invested (or more likely, royally pissed off) and don't trust myself to write in a professional manner, and

3. I genuinely want the message to sound cold, corporate, and unemotional

Number 3 would fit you here. These people are not being respectful to you in presenting code for review that respects your time. Why should you take the time to write back personally?

It should be noted that this accounts for maybe 5% of my business communications, and I'm careful not to let that number grow.

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walleeee 5 days ago | parent [-]

> Why should you take the time to write back personally?

Because it's 3 sentences, if you want to be way more polite and verbose than necessary.

"I will close PRs if they appear to be largely LLM-generated. I am always happy to review something with care and attention if it shows the same qualities. Thanks!"

The idea is to get your coworkers to stop sending you AI slop, send them AI slop in retaliation?

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esperent 5 days ago | parent [-]

> if they appear to be largely LLM-generated

And then what if the person denies it?

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bluefirebrand 4 days ago | parent [-]

Run it up the chain

They're either lying about using AI, or they're incompetent enough to produce AI quality (read: Garbage) code, either way the company should let them go

	▲	walleeee 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		That would be the nuclear option, but if you have any rapport at all with the person or team in question, you could also just pull them aside, ask if they are under unusual pressure to show progress, and make it clear that you get it, and you want to help, but that you can't if you're drowning in AI slop code review. I imagine it's a junior doing this, in which case it's in their career interest to stop and start acting like a professional. I've had seniors tell me more or less the same thing, in the pre-llm era: "slow down and get it right." Sometimes you just need to hear that.

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sothatsit 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This feels like a culture problem. I have seen higher-quality PRs as people use AI to review their work before pushing it. This means less silly typos and obvious small bugs.

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bootsmann 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nothing makes me hate AI more than getting a slop PR written by one of the agent-wielding coworkers with the comments describing what the next line does for every line. More often than not it looks plausible but turns out to be completely unusable upon closer inspection. Incredibly disrespectful to do this to your coworkers imo, its proper that you call it out.

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tjpnz 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If you had a colleague who was consistently writing complete shit you would raise it with your manager. This situation isn't all that different - the only complicating factor they're not on your team.

If it's only happened a few times you might first try setting some ground rules for contributions. Really common for innersource repos to have a CONTRIBUTING.md file or similar. Add a checkbox to your PR template that the dev has to check to indicate they've read it, then wait and see.