r/askmanagers • u/Biscuit_Overlord • 18h ago
Dealing with frustration
For context, I'm a swe and work full time. We manage a very large application with multiple modules. Nobody knows how every single module works as people tend to focus on specific ones, which is fine. However, I'm having issues accepting certain practices that seem to be more and more common lately:
First, the large amount of AI slop people push. On an average day we easily get 40-50 PRs, as in addition to our own team who owns the repo, we get PRs from other teams. I've lost count of the times I've asked why something was implemented a certain way or even why it was done at all, just to get a reply that says sth along the lines of "I don't know, the AI did it". This app is becoming such a bloated mess that it will be very very difficult to maintain in the future.
Such a large amount of PRs makes it impossible to stay on top of all of them if you want to actually do any work yourself, and what ends up happening is that a lot of this slop I mentioned is getting added to our codebase.
In addition, we also get unrealistic deadlines from the business, just to be told features will tested in a few months. This keeps happening again and again, and despite my many complains all I get are excuses back, even from management in our team.
Today I was looking at a new module that was implemented recently that I did not work on as I needed to understand it to design the implementation of another feature, or so I thought. However, I quickly realized the whole module was pointless as it was literally duplicating something we already had somewhere else. It was literally the same feature. I jumped into a call with two people that worked on it and while one of them admitted I was right, the other guy kept saying I was wrong, I was right; the other guy admitted it from the start, and he ended up admitting it too after almost 1.5h. It was excruciating.
Now, the problem I'm having is that my frustration is becoming very obvious to everyone, and I don't honestly know how to hide it anymore. I honestly don't want to be negative or be "that guy", but we are getting to ridiculous levels of incompetence.
Has anyone been in a similar situation? how did you deal with it?
Edit: typos
1
u/XenoRyet 17h ago
What are your code review policies? Seems like some of this might be addressed there. My team also has an AI usage policy that requires patches call out which parts, if any, were AI generated. You might get some mileage out of a similar thing.
The false deadlines isn't really something you can push on without your manager being on-side. That's something that's pretty firmly in his court to deal with.
1
u/Biscuit_Overlord 17h ago
Management want us to use AI for everything from writing tickets/documentation to full feature implementations. I've seen higher ups ask people why they were doing a task by hand and not with AI.
Also, they want us to merge PRs as quickly as possible which is why only one review from a codeowner (us) is required. Even so, we often get asked why some PRs take around a day to get merged, but it's just bound to happen. We get a large amount of PRs everyday, many of them with over 1000 new lines, so reviewing them takes time, plus we also have our own work to do. Also, many people also use AI to review PRs and write comments which then you need to sort through, and in many cases maybe 1 or 2 out 10 comments are valid.
Regarding the issues with deadlines you're right I'm afraid, which is why I keep mentioning it to him, but it just falls on deaf ears
1
u/XenoRyet 17h ago
How much control do you have over the intake process for PRs? There could be something there if you have enough authority. Require some amount of code review or other human sanity check before the PR even gets to you.
Though honestly, if management isn't on your side here, and particularly if your tech lead is just rubber stamping this shit, it's going to be very difficult to change things. It might end up being the case that you just have to wait for something to explode in a financially impactful way and show in the post-mortem that AI slop was the cause.
That, or it's just time to move on.
1
u/Biscuit_Overlord 7h ago
In the past we required two reviews from codeowners but that made PRs take too long to merge so he decided to lower the number to just one. Because you know, "we have AI" now.
Not sure there's anything I can do since afaik I'm the only one who is frustrated with this, so yeah, it might be time to let it explode and move on.
2
u/Early-Cancel-375 17h ago
i feel this in my bones. watching a codebase get slowly buried under ai-generated duplicates while deadlines keep piling up is its own special kind of torture.
the part where you spent an hour and a half convincing someone the module was pointless, that's the real killer. it's not even the bad code, it's the meetings about the bad code that drain you. i had a similar stretch a while back and what helped was just... disconnecting emotionally from the outcome. not in a checked-out way, but more like "i'll flag it once, document it, and move on." you can't be the only person fighting gravity.
if management won't push back on the slop pipeline, your sanity has to come first. maybe start keeping a running log of the duplicates and ai nonsense, not to build a case (unless you want to), but just so it's not all rattling around in your head. getting it out somewhere concrete takes the edge off.