man

1 month ago: i submit fix for memory leak due to incorrect refcounting to a project. response: we can’t merge without thorough investigation because the library that is heavily implied in this was written by a very smart googler who got bus factored and we don’t know if anything depends on this.

so i leave a detailed comment with findings, homework and reader exercises, and that gets merged.

fast forward to earlier this week: lead guy cherry picks my original fix and files PR for the rest to review, with the message being claude LLM “analysis” results that paraphrase exactly what i told them before, as if that suddenly gives it any more weight

i got upset not primarily because a datacenter-scale coin toss machine strapped to a code validator in a brute-force arrangement gets preferential treatment, or because the fix should have been merged earlier, but because on the one hand they erred on the side of caution, on the other hand they defer judgment to a text predictor that can neither validate its claims nor provide a summary of what edge cases it actually considered, when clearly this is a task that requires an attention span instead of just the ability to interpret and extrapolate

@snacks if said googler were half as smart as they give him credit for (“one of the smartest people who ever lived” does set the bar rather high) he wouldn’t have left so many trivial CVEs

which kinda says something about these people

@snacks the smart thing to do is to take as much time as your work requires and make it crystal clear to your boss that it is indeed how long it is going to take, and that it is an optimistic estimate assuming unbroken focus with no setbacks and no changes in your priorities, and that given those conditions you can guarantee to deliver on that date but no sooner because you refuse to accrue technical debt that will accumulate an estimated X amount of developer time in interest for every month that he chooses to deprioritize it

@snacks a boss that makes you work an unreasonable schedule is simply incompetent, but so is an employee that promises what they can’t deliver because they’re scared of losing their job just because they’re “slow”, because that promise will get forwarded straight to customers more often than not

@snacks is there anyone else on your team who can help you with mundane bullshit that isn’t hard but simply demoralizing