I am curious about this also. I have now seen multiple PR's that I had to review that a method was clearly completely modified by AI with no good reason and when asked why something was changed we just got silence. Not exaggerating, literal silence and then trying to ignore the question and explain the thing we were first asking them to do. Clearly having no idea what is actually in this PR.
This was done because we asked for a minor change to be done (talking maybe 5 lines of code) and tested. So now not only are we dealing with new debt, we are dealing with code that no one can explain why it was completely changed (and some of the changes were changes for the sake of change), and we are dealing with those of us that manage this code now looking at completely foreign code.
I keep seeing this with people that are using these tools and they are not higher level engineers. We finally got to the point of denying these PR's and saying to go back and do it again. Loosing any of the time that was theoretically gained from doing it in the first place.
Not saying these tools don't have a place. But people are using it without understanding what it is putting out and not understanding the long term effects it will have on a code base.
This was done because we asked for a minor change to be done (talking maybe 5 lines of code) and tested. So now not only are we dealing with new debt, we are dealing with code that no one can explain why it was completely changed (and some of the changes were changes for the sake of change), and we are dealing with those of us that manage this code now looking at completely foreign code.
I keep seeing this with people that are using these tools and they are not higher level engineers. We finally got to the point of denying these PR's and saying to go back and do it again. Loosing any of the time that was theoretically gained from doing it in the first place.
Not saying these tools don't have a place. But people are using it without understanding what it is putting out and not understanding the long term effects it will have on a code base.