We are talking about a "stupid" tool that parses a google sheet and makes calls to a third-party API
So there is one google sheet per team, with one column per person
One line per day
And each day, someone is in charge of the duty
The tool grabs the data from the sheet and configures pagerduty so that alerts go to the right person
Very basic, no cleverness needed, really straightforward actually
So we have 1 person that wrote the code, with AI. Then we have a second person that checked the code (with AI). Then the shit comes to my desk. To see this kind of cruft:
def create_headers(api_token: str) -> dict:
"""Create headers for PagerDuty API requests.
Args:
api_token: PagerDuty API token.
Returns:
Headers dictionary.
"""
return {
"Accept": "application/vnd.pagerduty+json;version=2",
"Authorization": f"Token token={api_token}",
"Content-Type": "application/json",
}
And then, we have 5 usage like this:
def delete_override(
base_url: str,
schedule_id: str,
override_id: str,
api_token: str,
) -> None:
"""Delete an override from a schedule.
Args:
base_url: PagerDuty API base URL.
schedule_id: ID of the schedule.
override_id: ID of the override to delete.
api_token: PagerDuty API token.
"""
headers = create_headers(api_token)
override_url = f"{base_url}/schedules/{schedule_id}/overrides/{override_id}"
response = requests.delete(override_url, headers=headers, timeout=60)
response.raise_for_status()
No HTTP keep-alive, no TCP reuse, the API key is passed down to every method, so is the API's endpoint. Timeout is defined in each method.
The file is ~800 lines of python code, contains 19 methods and only deals with pagerduty (not google sheet). It tooks 2 fulltime days.
These people fail to produce anything meaningful, this is not really a surprise given their failure to do sane things with such a basic topic
Does AI brings good idea: obviously no, but we knew this.
Does AI improves the quality of the result (regardless of the quality of the idea): apparently no
Does AI improves productivity: again, given this example: no
Are these people better, more skilled or else: no
Try pasting that full code into Claude and prompting:
> No HTTP keep-alive, no TCP reuse, the API key is passed down to every method, so is the API's endpoint. Timeout is defined in each method. Fix all of those issues.
Even in normal human-written code, it's not guaranteed to get the code completely correct in one-shot. That's why code review and QA still exists.
The issue here is more organizational with the engineers not getting the code up to standards before handing off, not the capabilities of the AI itself.
What if you don’t know the problem? That’s kind of the crux of the issue here. You still need an expert operator, and at that point it is just saving some typing, but not even necessarily saving time with all the back and forth.
We are talking about a "stupid" tool that parses a google sheet and makes calls to a third-party API
So there is one google sheet per team, with one column per person
One line per day
And each day, someone is in charge of the duty
The tool grabs the data from the sheet and configures pagerduty so that alerts go to the right person
Very basic, no cleverness needed, really straightforward actually
So we have 1 person that wrote the code, with AI. Then we have a second person that checked the code (with AI). Then the shit comes to my desk. To see this kind of cruft:
And then, we have 5 usage like this: No HTTP keep-alive, no TCP reuse, the API key is passed down to every method, so is the API's endpoint. Timeout is defined in each method. The file is ~800 lines of python code, contains 19 methods and only deals with pagerduty (not google sheet). It tooks 2 fulltime days.These people fail to produce anything meaningful, this is not really a surprise given their failure to do sane things with such a basic topic
Does AI brings good idea: obviously no, but we knew this. Does AI improves the quality of the result (regardless of the quality of the idea): apparently no Does AI improves productivity: again, given this example: no Are these people better, more skilled or else: no
Am I too demanding ? Am I asking too much ?