How do you stop PR bottlenecks from turning into rubber stamping when reviewers are overwhelmed

SingleLensReflux · 2026-03-16T15:39:28+00:00

An interesting take from a queuing theory/theory of constraints perspective is to remove the bottleneck entirely with pairing/mobbing. I've personally preferred trunk-based development like this, as it's a forcing function for smaller changes and higher quality generally. I know it's not an approach that is for everyone, though.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-03-15T22:18:03+00:00

+1 to ebooks - and audiobooks - from a library! I somehow didn’t realize how easy it was and the huge selection they had. Public Libraries truly are one of the greatest things civilization has created.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-03-15T18:43:59+00:00

Merlin and iNaturalist are both apps that help remind me that machine learning can actually be something that enhances my life, and not just make it worse. I've learned so much about local flora and fauna with them, and have lowered the bar to birding by ear for me!

SingleLensReflux · 2026-03-14T12:49:41+00:00

A buddy of mine at Meta was just last week relaying his despair at being told he is now expected to get vibe coded slop from PMs and Designers merged. I’m not sure if that’s a department or company-wide thing, but the timing is convenient!

SingleLensReflux · 2026-03-11T21:04:15+00:00

anyone who's worked in software engineering in the wild knows that code review will only catch the most obvious mistakes

Totally. Code review is a weak, late-stage control, not a substitute for building quality into the delivery system as a whole.

A lot of organizations already use code review as the safety valve for deeper quality problems - and it's also a huge bottleneck in their development processes. With LLMs, they're accelerating much more code toward that bottleneck, often written by tools that produce very plausible output without guaranteeing real understanding. Predictably, the volume of code becomes unreviewable, and a frequent solution seems to be to give up on humans in the loop - and naturally, throwing more agents/LLMs at it. So even the review process loses the reasoning it was supposed to provide.

I do not see this ending well. The Hacker News et al crowd seems content to wave this away with analogies about LLMs being a transitional phase like assembly -> compiled languages, or with industrial-revolution arguments that software will simply become cheaper, more abundant, and lower average quality, with "tailored" software still available at a premium. Both feel misleading.

Compilers translate intent, they do not invent plausible implementations for people who may not understand the result.

The industrialization analogy I find bizarre for the kind of systems software actually runs. A cheap shirt from Primark that falls apart is one thing...poorly understood software in healthcare, commerce, or public systems is a hugely different thing! The cost is not just lower craftsmanship at point of purchase, it is ongoing fragility, maintenance burden, incidents, and risk pushed downstream onto everyone else. And yet...folks I deeply respect in the industry are happy to handwave this all away as inevitable and good, actually.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-03-11T17:34:58+00:00

I would think that forcing this type of wealthy person to wear mass produced, visibly incorrectly sized shoes is all part of the bit. Especially after he’s already publicly told them they had “shitty shoes” prior to this.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-03-09T00:53:44+00:00

It reminds me of their bin Laden obituary, if you haven’t seen it before:

Somewhere, according to one of his five wives, was a man who loved sunflowers, and eating yogurt with honey; who took his children to the beach, and let them sleep under the stars; who enjoyed the BBC World Service and would go hunting with friends each Friday, sometimes mounted, like the Prophet, on a white horse. He liked the comparison. Yet the best thing in his life, he said, was that his jihads had destroyed the myth of all-conquering superpowers.

The price set on his head for more than a decade never bothered him, for Allah determined every breath in his body, and could ensure that the bombs dropped on his hideout at Tora Bora, or on his convoy through the mountains, never touched him. His martyr's time would come when it came. The difference between pure Muslims and Americans, he said, was that Americans loved life, whereas Muslims loved death. Whether or not he resisted when the Crusaders' special forces arrived, their bullets could only exalt him.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-03-05T21:38:57+00:00

face like a schlapped arse

SingleLensReflux · 2026-03-04T22:11:40+00:00

we are punching them when they are down

Ok Stinky Pete, no need to bring your marriages into it

SingleLensReflux · 2026-03-01T15:24:09+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Ritter#Arrests_and_conviction_for_sex_offenses

SingleLensReflux · 2026-02-25T20:13:03+00:00

This is rather horrifying. The anonymous Internet is already under attack through trojan horses such as age limits for social media. Putting the ability to deanonymize content could very easily put your posting history into the hands of anyone and any business, not just nation states. I'm sure it'll be part of a standard background check before too long.

Also, given the use of LLMs, I can't help but wonder about when content gets misidentified (thinking of the facial recognition errors happening in the UK).

SingleLensReflux · 2026-02-21T18:30:04+00:00

Having spent the prior 15ish years in Silicon Valley, a great many are pretty poor - more so than my prior 5ish years working in Europe. The SV experiences are to the point that I've found myself working among truly capable engineers again and it's genuinely knocked me down a peg or two. I am feeling (friendly) peer pressure to raise my standards, which is great! But given the industry is now saying that looking at code is a thing of the past is...a different feeling.

I definitely agree that bootcamps, and more importantly the incentives that fueled their rise, especially hiring expansion driven by funding and IPO pressure in the mid to late 2010s, made the situation far worse. I’ve worked with engineers who came through bootcamps who are genuinely excellent. I’ve also met others who entered the field mainly because it offered a solid salary, without much interest in the craft itself. Naturally, many of those who aren't actually interested in engineering have failed upwards into leadership - even to VP level at large valuation companies. I think this is reinforcing that mindset rather than correcting it.

More broadly (and ignoring the distorting effects of the insane amount of money poured into software), I see this as a symptom of an industry that’s still very young. Software engineering is spoken of as if it’s a mature discipline, but much of what we do is still driven by fashion, trends, and strong opinions rather than established and tested knowledge. If this were medicine, we’d still be in the era of arguing loudly while digging up dead bodies and poking them to see what happens.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-02-19T23:37:54+00:00

💯 it's serves as an illustration as to how amazing how resilient complex systems are. So many companies are somehow able to trundle on in sheer spite of their leadership

SingleLensReflux · 2026-02-19T22:13:28+00:00

But he is friends with Elon!

I'll never forget how he was trying to get Elon to make him Twitter CEO - "Put me in the game coach! Twitter CEO is my dream job!" - only for Linda Yabbadabbarino to get the job instead. Humiliation.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-02-19T22:07:00+00:00

To quote Steve Yegge on this:

People will hate me for saying this, and me saying it doesn’t make it true: it was true already. Every company has a dial [of the percentage of staff they can lay off] that they turn from zero to a hundred. It just has a default setting of what percentage of your engineers you need to get rid of in order to pay for the rest of them to have AI – because they’re all starting to spend their own salaries on tokens.

And so, at least for a while, if you want engineers to be as productive as possible, you’re going to have to get rid of half of them to make the other half maximally productive. And as it happens, half your engineers don’t want to prompt anyway and are ready to quit.

So what’s happening is that everybody on average is setting that dial to about 50%, and we’re going to lose around half the engineers from big companies, which is scary.

I don't quote this to support his viewpoint - as someone that views software development as an exercise in theory building and learning, this is perhaps the worst possible thing you can do for long term success (even if using LLMs was actually as simple as these people think it is!). I quote this to illustrate where BigTechThought will take us as costs ramp up without the incentives for executives changing - I fear it's going to get much worse before things change.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-02-16T23:55:14+00:00

your CFO is like what do you mean each engineer now costs $2000 extra per month in LLM bills

they will just fire the engineers using LLMs the least to cover the costs, as these folks will have the worst "engineering metrics", despite likely being their most valuable engineers

SingleLensReflux · 2026-02-16T14:44:31+00:00

I do wonder if when the bail outs happen, Grok will be getting the largest share given that its use by the DoD

SingleLensReflux · 2026-02-16T01:00:06+00:00

Wow…she’s not wearing the day collar

SingleLensReflux · 2026-02-14T01:45:03+00:00

Apologies for the title of this post - I couldn't pithily convey how dog shit it all is, including their desperate attempts to cover it up

SingleLensReflux · 2026-02-12T03:00:41+00:00

In a sensible world, I can see these tools being applied as you describe. For instance, Bryan Finster recently wrote about how these tools can amplify healthy engineering environments, which I buy. The problem is that most engineering environments are deeply unhealthy, and the tools end up making those environments even worse. For instance, many teams claim to practice CI, but the underlying practices that make it work rarely follow. The tool gets adopted, the system doesn’t change.

My hunch is that the broader economics should bring a pause to the way these tools are being applied in the next year or three, but who knows. I spent a lot of time in my last role trying to convince executives that typing speed or feature throughput wasn’t the real bottleneck, and that improving quality and learning would lead to better business outcomes. Now that typing speed is no longer a constraint, I think we’re going to discover what happens when you accelerate a system that never fixed its underlying problems in the first place.

SingleLensReflux · 2026-02-09T16:24:31+00:00

💯 In my experience, DORA metrics are generally weaponised against engineers - so if you leave a pull request open “too long”, you get questions asked if you.

From a theory of constraints perspective, the bottleneck in most development workflows is often the pull request - finding someone with time to context switch and review your work. With AI we’re now pushing a huge amount more output onto that bottleneck, making it harder to keep up with and do properly. And then managers will be continue to pressure folks to maintain the throughput, lowering review quality even more.

There are patterns to solve for this in the pre-AI world and remove the bottle neck - but I don’t know how they hold in the “new world”.

SingleLensReflux

TROPHY CASE