I promise this blog will have more than an engineer yelling at the clouds about LLM pain. I was actually working on a retrospective on X-Men Legends, or my experiences building an NES emulator in Rust. However slop PRs started hitting a codebase I maintain at work. And like any healthy individual I wish to commiserate about this with others on the internet.
I’d like to think I have some ability for introspection. Is it me that’s the problem? Am I just not with it anymore? It’s one thing to see the spam come in and go “man this sucks”. But it’s another thing to have to explain to misguided individuals why their behavior is destructive. This is my attempt at delving into the “why”. Why do these slop PRs bother me so much? Why do they feel like such a drain?
I’ve seen lots of people describe LLMs as a junior developer, but for this very reason, they are worse than a junior. I can train a junior and build them into senior, so the time spent correcting mistakes is still worthwhile. I can’t train an LLM, so correcting mistakes is just pointless.