Post #4458464

2026-08-09 04:19 UTC

This isn’t an original idea but rather a distillation of the ideas of others in a way that made it click for me, but: AI slop code review is so much more draining because it is a fundamentally different task; your job goes from verifying and sense checking someone else’s human understanding to, oftentimes, developing the human understanding that the “author” has not bothered to undertake at a more-than-perfunctory level. Which is exhausting in itself and ALSO violates the social contract of code review.

Replies (2)

@coderanger@cloudisland.nz 2026-08-09 05:02

@daisy@cloudisland.nz /me has been writing PyCon slides about this today :) My hot take is that normal code review is reconstructing enough fragments of the author's mental state to confirm _that_ was correct, the code itself is just a window into the mental state. The large pile of linear algebra does not posses a "mental" let alone any states thereof.

Open ##4459372
@mcc@mastodon.social 2026-08-09 04:21

@daisy@cloudisland.nz this is what bothers me about the idea of working at a company that "doesn't require" but allows slopcode. Because if the thing slopcoders do is let the machine randomly generate the code and then review it, and I'm the person reviewing the PR from *the slopcoder*, then aren't I, myself, actually slopcoding? I'm doing the slopcoder's job

Open ##4459415