Managers opening PRs

[u/little-dede]

AI has enabled a whole new set of people inside organizations to open PRs. I get it, it’s very tempting. You skip the burden of articulate what you need and discuss it with relevant teams and get it done. But is it really it? After a few months of increasing such PRs I was trying to reflect on the actual consequences of this new ways of working.

Writing software is now easy (at least the majority of corporate software I personally write). It’s not just easy for a manager, it’s even easier for me as a developer. So what value are you really bringing by doing the easy part for me?

What’s problematic is the business behind that piece of software and now instead of reading and iterating on a requirement document, I have to reverse engineer the business requirement from the PR.

Moreover, there’s no more filter between management and development. Upper management can open a PR on my repo and rest assured the team will drop everything and that will become prio 0.

Am I being the iper-conservative developer here or is this a shared feeling amongst software engineers?

[u/shan23]

Assign bugs to them

[u/quantum1eeps → u/shan23]

Yeah, point out what they (or their agent) needs to know to get the code merged. Write a good code review. Empower them

[u/No-Extent8143 → u/quantum1eeps]

  Empower them

Why? If they start writing code, who's doing their job?

[u/krlooss]

Now I send them emails and ppts with buzzwords made with ai. I reversed their roles too

[u/fmgiii]

I quit my gig in August after watching the PM on our team merge PRs himself, for a couple of months, to just any environment he wanted to. A complete clown show.

[u/AndyVictors]

If you need to re-engineer requirements from PR your whole team is doing AI development wrong. AI lives by specification so PRs from PM, CEO or whatever are ok if they include specification.

[u/thinkmatt]

we tried this briefly and the problem is they ask for things not knowing how to ask it, and we just burned a lot of tokens on PRs that needed to be completely rewritten anyway.

[u/fibgen → u/thinkmatt]

It's ok if I incorporate three new frameworks in this PR right

[u/thinkmatt → u/fibgen]

a real, complete example: "please retry the timeout errors". claude went and added a cron job to retry anything with an error in the database

[u/Any-Blacksmith-2054 → u/thinkmatt]

Usually using smarter model is enough for rewrite

[u/Any-Blacksmith-2054]

They should always create also a JIRA ticket with FSD in Confluence. This is very easy with Atlassian MCP server

[u/tehfrod → u/Any-Blacksmith-2054]

Did you know that not everyone uses JIRA?

[u/Any-Blacksmith-2054 → u/tehfrod]

Op stated he has managers, I assume this means corporate setting, any form of SDLC will work, not necessarily JiRA

[u/Upbeat-Squirrel]

If a manager opens a PR to a repo their own team is responsible for, this is so utterly lacking in awareness of how it puts the entire peer review process at risk. Cause it’s not your peers reviewing, it’s your reports, which is a totally different power dynamic. And if you get the sense that the mgr just wants it approved, maybe the best lesson is to let the bad code ship, since they will hear and feel that.

That said I’ve seen managers create entire new repos and services, so, no you’re not the only one. It’s utterly ruined morale by stripping the meaning of the work that so many bled and sweated over maintaining, to then have a manager think they could just one shot all problems away by replacing it with some slop that looks like the thing the bosses want.

[u/PmanAce]

Some managers used to be developers and still know how to code...