This is what I keep running into. Earlier this week I did a code review of about new lines of code, written using Cursor, to implement a feature from scratch, and I'd say maybe 200 of those lines were really necessary.
But, y'know what? I approved it. Because hunting down the existing functions it should have used in our utility library would have taken me all day. 5 years ago I would have taken the time because a PR like that would have been submitted by a new team member who didn't know the codebase well, and helping to onboard new team members is an important part of the job. But when it's a staff engineer using Cursor to fill our codebase with bloat because that's how management decided we should work, there's no point. The LLM won't learn anything and will just do the same thing over again next week, and the staff engineer already knows better but is being paid to pretend they don't.
>>because that's how management decided we should work, there's no point
If you are personally invested, there would be a point. At least if you plan to maintain that code for a few more years.
Let's say you have a common CSS file, where you define .warning {color: red}. If you want the LLM to put out a warning and you just tell it to make it red, without pointing out that there is the .warning class, it will likely create a new CSS def for that element (or even inline it - the latest Claude Code has a tendency to do that). That's fine and will make management happy for now.
But if later management decides that it wants all warning messages to be pink, it may be quite a challenge to catch every place without missing one.
There really wouldn't be; it would just be spitting into the wind. What am I going to do, convince every member of my team to ignore a direct instruction from the people who sign our paychecks?
I really really hate code review now. My colleagues will have their LLMs generate thousands of lines of boiler plate with every pattern and abstraction under the sun. A lazy programmer use to do the bare minimum and write not enough code. That made review easy. Error handling here, duplicate code there, descriptive naming here, and so on. Now a lazy programmer generates a crap load of code cribbed from "best practice" tutorials, much of it unnecessary and irrelevant for the actual task at hand.
But, y'know what? I approved it. Because hunting down the existing functions it should have used in our utility library would have taken me all day. 5 years ago I would have taken the time because a PR like that would have been submitted by a new team member who didn't know the codebase well, and helping to onboard new team members is an important part of the job. But when it's a staff engineer using Cursor to fill our codebase with bloat because that's how management decided we should work, there's no point. The LLM won't learn anything and will just do the same thing over again next week, and the staff engineer already knows better but is being paid to pretend they don't.