The technical debt, inconsistency, and fragility caused by merging huge volumes of unreviewed AI-generated code aren't new engineering problems at all — they're the exact same old software engineering problems, just happening on fast-forward.
Responding to a listener merging 60 PRs a week with almost no human review, Scott argues the resulting mess isn't a new kind of problem — it's classic bad software engineering, just accelerated by AI. ✦ AI generated
Scott Tolinski · Syntax · 2026-07-08 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 9:24
“On my team, a common workflow is an engineer asks an agent to implement a feature or fix a bug, open a PR, address automated review comments if necessary, waits for CI to pass, and merges. In many cases, there is little to no meaningful human review of the actual code.”
The problems you are describing here are not new at all and the solutions to these problems are not new either at all. We know how to make a good software and the fact that you guys are just doing it on a speedrun is just making it much faster.
verbatim transcript · starts at 9:24
9:24right?" And and you're just doing it on like you're just speed running it on on like fast mode now where it may have may have taken you 6 years previously to get to a point where your code base is a mess and things are duplicated. The problems you are describing here are not new at all and the solutions to these problems are not new either at all. You we know how to how to make a
9:49good software and the fact that you guys are just doing it on a speedrun is just making it much faster. >> Man, that's crazy. 60 plus PRs in a release cycle. That's one week >> individuals, yeah. At that point like the code base would be unrecognizable in in several months. Um which is partially not like it like some parts of your code base you just don't understand
10:14it's easy the AI can explain it to you but those like high-level architecture, you know, if you're just adding a whole bunch of crap and duplicating it it's going to be very tricky to sort of unwind a lot of those especially if you don't have like tests and whatnot. >> I think one thing that the prompt bros don't realize about this stuff is because, you know, most of them have
10:36never maintained old systems or long-running systems or these types of things. That tech debt is really real and and tech debt is is such a major problem with AI now because it's so easy to add code and like AI hates to remove code even when you beg it to remove code. So like yeah, I just feel like the amount of code that we be adding sometimes is going to come back to haunt teams.
11:02And sure, you know, Fable is going to come out again and the the clouds will part and you'll say hey make it better and they'll make it better. [laughter] Um and and maybe that's the case but yeah, in the meantime I think we're going to be seeing a lot of software and apps like barely held together cuz that's that's wild to me. Next question here from Sarah Chen. In episode 1009 you
- ·60 PRs merged weekly with almost no human review
- ·Resulting mess isn't a new kind of problem
- ·It's classic bad software engineering, just faster
- ·Known solutions still apply, just on fast-forward
- ·Problems described aren't new at all
- ·Solutions to these problems aren't new either
- ·We already know how to make good software
- ·AI just makes doing it wrong much faster