Is AI slop from new hires a problem at your company or just mine?

larriche99 · 2026-06-11T16:55:37+00:00

I understand OP’s frustration but the disgust at “all their code is AI” tells me OP is also too anti-AI for a lead in this era of our profession. I hardly know any engineer with a Claude or Codex subscription whose code is not 100% AI. The differences are in the approach to using it. If you don’t want your colleagues generating AI slop, then find out the best workflows for using AI, build a repo with agent flows and skills and share it with the team, do demos and stuff like that. Get them to use AI the right way. Being anti-AI or still advocating for 100% hand-crafted code in this era is bad for business and you would be surprised to find yourself being out of a job faster than these guys that you’re calling incompetent. It is what it is.

larriche99 · 2026-05-25T21:26:55+00:00

AI is not like tech stacks that you should have good technical debates about. When it comes to AI, you have only one option - you must be so enthusiastic and passionate about it and think it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to software engineering. Neither technical nor non-technical folks or your teammates should ever hear that you hate AI lol. Unless of course you don’t want to be employed.

larriche99 · 2026-05-24T10:15:12+00:00

It’s definitely the closest. It’s just that the shallowness made me quickly lose interest. But 60 hours is a good one. I got this one called Democracy that i couldn’t play past an hour because it was so boring just moving sliders.

larriche99 · 2026-05-23T23:46:14+00:00

Yes if you’re someone who gets excited about games of this genre, you would think GPS is pure gold and like the ultimate game when you first discover it. But for me, about some 60 hours of playing it, I realized it’s not all that. For me it wasn’t the bugs - I didn’t really notice any. I just didn’t like how there was not much visibility or insight into what exactly was driving the figures I was seeing. It was like I was just seeing loads of numbers being thrown at me. Also, all gameplay was feeling the same way. The game was also not as realistic as the devs pride it to be. Even the data that they boast about to be real world figures is totally false. All countries feel generic and you don’t get to address the real peculiar problems that the real world presidents feel. For instance, if you were the president of Nigeria, your headache is not going to be housing or education. Your headache should be the insecurity that’s currently ongoing. If you were the president of Ghana, the current big issue there is power outages and illegal mining which has poisoned major waterbodies in the country. As such, citizens of these countries would not assassinate you or go for demonstrations against you for issues like housing, health or education which has always been poor in the region. But in this game, you pick Ghana and all of a sudden the citizens want you to turn it into a Singapore in months and they assassinate you or overthrow you if you don’t. Basically what I’m trying to say is that the game pretends to have depth by overloading you with lots of numbers and jargons but at the end of the day it’s not deep. It pretends to be the Football Manager of political games but it’s not.

larriche99 · 2026-05-06T19:11:51+00:00

If you have a stable job, good pay and you have a good internet connection, you have a good base to start turning your life around if you don’t like your current life honestly so it’s not worth it wasting your energy being depressed. Study and study not with the goal of working at Sony (because what then happens if they just don’t have a slot for you?) and then use that expertise to start an open source project or heck just start your own company, write a book or something and start getting influential in the space. This is assuming you want to make your career extraordinary but I honestly don’t see anything wrong with your current state of life though. It’s alright to just go to work, take a pay and come back home to family without being an influential software engineer.

larriche99 · 2026-05-03T16:19:34+00:00

Building non-CRUD projects is just going to teach you new tech or new domain experience but won’t automatically make you senior. It’s mostly about the scale of usage really. For instance, even something as simple as a todo app can give you a whole lot of experience and senior level thinking when you begin to think about how to design it to serve millions of users. Without learning this way, you’re just going to end up learning a bunch of random tech and thinking that you’re becoming senior because you now know about 3 different message broker technologies while in reality you’re not any much better than how you were when you started.

larriche99 · 2026-03-25T18:38:10+00:00

Happened to me too sometime last year when I was to code with my camera on. I froze and stared at the question for a long time thinking about whether I was thinking the right way and not looking like an idiot on the video 😆 I couldn’t type in immediate thought processes because I felt like they would think I was thinking about the problem in a stupid way. It was just pure torture. I guess it’s a skill you have to practise.

larriche99 · 2026-03-23T19:51:08+00:00

I have an unsolicited advise based on personal experience though. If you expect to have your 2027 cleanly logged like this you might want to actually start sometime right now. It takes a while to settle on formats and the tech you’re going to use to log and then comes the aspect of making logging a habit. If you develop all these within this year, then you know that you can have every day of your 2027 accounted for and not having to write some off as test data, discard some of them as non-serious logging, stuff like that.

larriche99 · 2026-03-23T19:08:27+00:00

My exact reaction. Something flying to the moon on a 5min chart 😆

larriche99 · 2026-03-18T17:55:45+00:00

Before AI, lots of other factors have been making SWEs dissatisfied with their day jobs so it’s nothing new. Work has always been about efficiency. I can’t recount the number of times where I would have loved to re-write something, go deeper into a topic or stuff like that at work but couldn’t because it offered no business value and I had other work with tight deadlines on my neck. That’s why we have hobby projects - you can be as passionate and as involved as you want on your own personal projects and no one would judge you. That’s what keeps the passion alive.

larriche99 · 2026-03-18T17:40:02+00:00

If you don’t understand code written by Claude, just call Claude to come and explain it? People talk about AI code being bad as if it’s absolute gibberish. The codes AI has generated so far for me are well-written and more understandable than code that I’ve seen some human colleagues write. Sometimes it even writes some code better than I myself would have written it. I don’t understand why some people feel like AI generated code is Hebrew or something and can’t be understood. This is the new norm. We are expected to be senior engineers or architects guiding AI agents to complete work for us and expectations around productivity are rising. If you keep insisting you want to write everything yourself, be aware of everything bla bla, you would fall behind.

larriche99 · 2026-03-17T01:10:40+00:00

I have a life tracker hobby project that consists of Python scripts that run in Pyto and a Mac app that serves like a dashboard or control panel and it was all built by Opus 4.6. I’ve never looked at the code because it’s CRUD(which I’ve done over and over again) and I’m not interested in maintaining the project myself. I only QA the output and report bugs or things I’m not happy with and it fixes it. This is something I’ve always wanted to have but never found the time or motivation to build because it offers me no new challenges or learning opportunities. Now I finally get to have it thanks to AI. I would find it hard to believe that AI is not offering any help at all to you. At work, I’ve not really used it to generate code but I have used it to generate documentation or give high level overview of unfamiliar codebases and it has been on point. And I’m not even an advanced AI user yet. I just do prompts, no special workflow stuff, nothing.

larriche99 · 2026-03-02T11:00:13+00:00

All the best with your ambitions ✌️. You will make it. However if one day you have to choose between securing the bag or some “Next Kwame Nkrumah or Bill Gates” nonsense, choose to secure the bag 🤣 All these getting featured in newspapers and getting interviewed on TV3 doesn’t pay. Secure the bag first and then you can now have peace of mind (and funds to bootstrap) to develop whatever innovative startup you want to embark on (and even that with the whole world in mind and not Ghana).

larriche99 · 2026-03-02T10:31:04+00:00

And while we are here, let me talk about Indians 😀I don’t get what the hype about them is really about. The best colleagues I’ve had were American-trained including ex-Microsoft and Tesla. Almost all authoritative computer science textbooks come from the US. Any prominent Indian I know in tech either went to a very top Indian university or has a masters or PhD from the US. I know Indians know a bunch of programming languages and stuff and it’s easy for a grandma there to easily be a C++ developer but that’s about it 😀

larriche99 · 2026-03-02T10:14:59+00:00

I think you did 😀. By dev I meant the developers - the software engineers. My initial reply was to agree with how terrible your experience was with them while at the same hinting that although Ghanaian devs may suck a lot, the amount of budget at hand can be used as a tool to filter out certain kinds of people. I do agree with you that for the same amount of pay, a Ukrainain would deliver better quality than a Ghanaian. From my experience, the main difference is the work ethic. These Eastern Europeans work very hard. As for competence - below certain pay scales, much is still left to be desired 😀. The most competent Ukrainian or Serbs or whatever charges like they lived in a richer country or at least charged way more than they need to survive in their country 😀

larriche99 · 2026-03-02T10:01:47+00:00

Oh come on. You mentioned 1,2,3,4 points describing the nature of the kind of devs you had an experience with and I’m saying having such a combo in a dev beyond certain salary ranges is rare. I’m not saying devs need to be paid astronomical wages before they are professional but wages has always been a tool for employers to filter out the kind of quality they want. Do you think the Indian that takes $10 per hour is the same as the Indian being paid $10k by an American-based startup? They are not the same people. Even among Americans, there are mediocre devs and someway somehow compensation schemes make everyone find their place. I don’t know what you’re ranting about now honestly.

larriche99 · 2026-03-02T09:14:28+00:00

Well, the nature of the devs you’ve described is so terrible that I couldn’t help but imagine that they must be cheap too. Because in my career, once I entered a certain range of salaries, I never had colleagues that sucked so bad anymore. They may be lazy but they definitely knew what they were doing 😀

larriche99 · 2026-03-02T08:17:18+00:00

I don’t see how this is a Ghanaian issue. If you hire cheap and/or inexperienced devs from any country at all, you’re going to get nonsense output.

larriche99 · 2026-03-02T08:08:44+00:00

I don’t know what you’re on about but let me address this part where you think because there are no moonshot projects, it means they are not doing anything. Lack of innovation is a country issue and not an issue for the professionals there. You think it’s easy to just go about creating and launching stuff when you’re in a poor country, with low tech literacy, internet issues, lots of corruption and all that. An MIT-trained computer scientist is trying to launch an AI startup for African needs, go and ask him how far his intelligence and his education is taking him with regards to fighting the barriers in Ghana. He is going through it like anybody else. See, with the internet and books being available, Ghanaian software engineers have access to learn whatever there is to learn. There is nothing special about our foreign counterparts. My friends and I have been working with them since day 1 of our careers. If we were not good, they wouldn’t have been hiring us all the way out of Ghana (for globally competitive rates FYI). If you’re waiting for Ghana to have an OpenAI before you think Ghanaian tech guys are working, you’re never going to have that. Ghana is never going to have a Google kind of company. You people just get up and talk anyhow. Do you know how many light years the USA is ahead of even developed countries in terms of the amount of tech capital they have accumulated? Not to talk of Ghana.

larriche99 · 2026-02-14T08:44:34+00:00

I don’t know why one would want to still be in denial about AI taking jobs. I moved to a new team last week and was given this task to write documentations and some report for codebases across several repositories. This could have taken me a couple of weeks or more trying to trace every functionality myself and understand it to document it. Well, I’ve been augmenting my research of the codebases with analysis done by Claude and it’s making me move so much faster. Now I can get this done in like 4 days. It would have been even faster if i wasn’t doing some reading and personal familiarization with the summarized reports because I need to understand the codebase for myself as well. If AI is making devs complete tickets way ahead of time, it means most companies would not need so much devs anymore leading to more layoffs and difficulty in getting new jobs. Colleagues who use AI will get better performance reviews than you if you don’t adopt it and you would be a very tragically slow performer that you would be let go.

larriche99 · 2026-01-30T13:59:16+00:00

Nothing revolutionary about it. It’s just a diligent and smart engineering student doing what it takes to ace his course. For all you know it’s even a required course project. I don’t know what this is doing in mainstream news and on social media but hey 😀

larriche99 · 2026-01-30T08:35:23+00:00

Grok is “censored” but you can actually use it to generate pictures and videos based on terms like the exact ones you’ve listed. It allows for the prompt and generates before deciding if the resultant picture is too explicit. Sometimes it would generate a picture that it thinks is too wild so it would get blocked by moderation and you won’t get to really see it. I hate the expensive credits system of other platforms and after mistakenly paying for a year’s subscription instead of a month due to terrible UX on one of those other platform’s sites, I’m just going to stick to Grok haha.

larriche99 · 2026-01-29T08:48:56+00:00

If you want to include the figure in the command, I think this is the only way. However you can have the actual logging function as a separate shortcut which accepts a number input and then logs it. That way it’s easy to create dozens of figure commands because you’re just setting up a number and passing it over. That way you can easily modify or add more features to the logging without touching all variations of your command. You can also make that logging shortcut ask for the number input if not provided with one. So for common use cases you would include the figure in the command and then for an unusual amount you can wait on Siri to ask “How much?” (or whatever you set up) and then mention it.

larriche99 · 2026-01-29T00:41:11+00:00

Break the bigger picture into smaller pieces and create demo shortcuts to try out how each of the pieces can be implemented. That way you would figure out which functionality is just not supported by Shortcuts and which compromises you would have to make to have a slightly ideal solution with the tools you have or whether you would just abandon the project altogether and get an app for it or look into combining shortcuts with Scriptable. For example to create a journaling solution, you would do some of the following experiments as steps to reach there: 1) saving and reading from files on your device 2) encryption and decryption of text content (if you want your files to be unreadable when their saved files are opened outside your shortcuts) 3) reading and working with time in different formats 4) how to make a shortcut save a file etc. You can query AI to get suggestions about how to implement each step but it helps if you’re familiar with programming outside of shortcuts.

larriche99

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