Hear, hear!

I've been proclaiming this exact point as part of my "Resurrecting the Dead" talk.

Code review of GenAI PRs is no longer about training the next generation of potential maintainers, making it just a time sink, sucking the joy out of being a maintainer.

Well done AI companies.
OSS can't survive without community, so destroying the communities is a great step towards destroying open source (in favour of the AI closed garden where tokens costs 100x what they do now)....

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:@jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net

Code reviewing was never the most interesting thing to do. But it had one important element. That, if done right, it was knowledge exchange between the reviewer and the coder. That can be quite motivating. Helping a fellow coder to become better. Reviewing "AI" written code does NOT come with that potential reward. The machine doesn't learn the way a human does. This turns code review into a menial, fruitless task that leads to frustration instead. That's my observation and opinion.

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Replying to @jrf_nl@phpc.social

@jrf_nl @elazar The fact that AI can’t learn is one of the worst parts about using it. There are certain things that are so prevalent in the training data that any amount of “memory” files stressing the importance of doing things a certain way will not overcome the tendency to follow what it was trained on.

One of those things is using commas instead of concatenation operators in PHP echo statements.

Replying to @ramsey@phpc.social

@ramsey As it happens, I came across this article today, and think it makes a similar and relevant point, albeit in a round-about and likely unintentional kind of way.

"Retrieval is the wrong tool for finding code an agent can fetch itself, and the right tool for remembering things an agent has no way to rediscover from the repo as it stands today."

A limited and often lacking ability to curate and navigate memories heavily curtails the usefulness of models.

qodo.ai/blog/we-built-a-state-

@jrf_nl

QodoWe built a state-of-the-art RAG system for code review. In Qodo 2.4, we took most of it out.Read about We built a state-of-the-art RAG system for code review. In Qodo 2.4, we took most of it out. in our blog.

Replying to @ramsey@phpc.social

@ramsey @jrf_nl I do appreciate the validation that AI has brought to the best practices that have become established over the last two decades or so: the importance of context in architecture and implementation, documentation and automated tests as first-class deliverables, static analysis tools, etc. I think it's given me a new appreciation of the fact that what makes developing software easier for us also makes it easier for AI agents.

Replying to @elazar@phpc.social

@elazar @jrf_nl That, and I’ve had some generally good experiences with it, but also some horrendously bad experiences. When it’s good, it’s good, and it’s good more often than not (nowadays). Still, we are not helping ourselves or the next generation by rushing headlong into it, not to mention the unethical practices of the companies behind these models.

Jul 5, 2026, 15:21 UTCen