Yeah, it's the "eager apprentice" problem, common almost everywhere. Solution is to make them stop and double-check before running ahead, in software development, concise design documents outlining what the problem is, what possible solutions are and what the chosen solution is, and why, then review this together with the person, before they can move on to implement it.
This particular apprentice is also my boss, an overall reasonable guy and has more experience in the software industry than myself, so there's that. He's just not a developer.
He's made a bunch of 1-2k LOC PRs and there is a design doc. Everything is AI generated.
The issue is, if he generates all of that without reviewing the code, he will always be far faster than us. And he can't review the code. No matter how he slices it.
Also, he is the CPO/CTO. So we can say no, but there is a natural incentive to go his way. He still doesn't feel confident enough to just bypass the programmers and he's probably right. But it'd nice to find a way to use my expertise to review this amount of code meaningfully, somehow.
Comments
throw his garbage out, the time and effort taken to review that is magnitudes more than what it took to prompt it.
have him start with an overall design doc if his change is 15k, it's definitely worth a design doc.
and then have his contributions reviewed in pieces of 200-300 LoC PRs.
any other solution is trading stability and system knowledge, that's 15k LoC no one is truly familiar with, even if you do try to review it
Yeah, it's the "eager apprentice" problem, common almost everywhere. Solution is to make them stop and double-check before running ahead, in software development, concise design documents outlining what the problem is, what possible solutions are and what the chosen solution is, and why, then review this together with the person, before they can move on to implement it.
This particular apprentice is also my boss, an overall reasonable guy and has more experience in the software industry than myself, so there's that. He's just not a developer.
He's made a bunch of 1-2k LOC PRs and there is a design doc. Everything is AI generated.
The issue is, if he generates all of that without reviewing the code, he will always be far faster than us. And he can't review the code. No matter how he slices it.
Also, he is the CPO/CTO. So we can say no, but there is a natural incentive to go his way. He still doesn't feel confident enough to just bypass the programmers and he's probably right. But it'd nice to find a way to use my expertise to review this amount of code meaningfully, somehow.