A similar trend: the popularity of electric scooters among youngsters who would otherwise walk, use public transport, or use decent vehicles increases accidents in cities.
Those days are gone. Coding is cheap. The same LLMs that enable people to submit 9000 line PRs of chaos can be used to quickly turn them into more sensible work. If they genuinely can't do a better job, rejecting the PR is still the right response. Just push back.
Much more so than before, I'll comfortably reject a PR that is hard to follow, for any reason, including size. IMHO, the biggest change that LLMs have brought to the table is that clean code and refactoring are no longer expensive, and should no longer be bargained for, neglected or given the lip service that they have received throughout most of my career. Test suites and documentation, too.
(Given the nature of working with LLMs, I also suspect that clean, idiomatic code is more important than ever, since LLMs have presumably been trained on that, but this is just a personal superstition, that is probably increasingly false, but also feels harmless)
The only time I think it is appropriate to land a large amount of code at once is if it is a single act of entirely brain dead refactoring, doing nothing new, such as renaming a single variable across an entire codebase, or moving/breaking/consolidating a single module or file. And there better be tests. Otherwise, get an LLM to break things up and make things easier for me to understand, for crying out loud: there are precious few reasons left not to make reviewing PRs as easy as possible.
So, I posit that the emotional reaction from certain audiences is still the largest, most exhausting difference.
Are you contending that LLMs produce clean code?
All the LLM hate here isn't observation, it's sour grapes. Complaining about slop and poor code quality outputs is confessing that you haven't taken the time to understand what is reasonable to ask for, aren't educating your junior engineers how to interact with LLMs.
Given the same ridiculously large and complex change, if it is handwritten only a seriously insensitive and arrogant crackpot could, knowing what's inside, submit it with any expectation that you accept it without a long and painful process instead of improving it to the best of their ability; on the other hand using LLM assistance even a mildly incompetent but valuable colleague or contributor, someone you care about, might underestimate the complexity and cost of what they didn't actually write and believe that there is nothing to improve.
