Instead he didn’t read it at all, and just threw the whole thing at Claude Code as a big prompt. The result was… interesting!
They put up a PR with all the obvious tells, the markdown table of files that changed, the description that basically parrots back things the human obviously wanted them to stress in the task (“this implements a secure, tested (no regressions) implementation of a Foo…”), and the code is an absolute mess of one-off functions placed in any random file with no thought to the way the codebase is actually organized.
Then I give feedback after spending like an hour going through their 2000 line change, and then here comes back an update with a very literal interpretation of my feedback that clearly doesn’t really understand what I was even saying. Complete with code comments that parrot back what I said (“// Use the expected platform abstractions for conversion (not bespoke methods”).
Reviewing coworkers PR’s feels like I’m just talking to the LLM directly at this point, but with more steps and I have less control over the output.
Some people have put me on their blacklists after these interactions, sure, but they're the exact people I don't want to work with again. The important thing here is that I've never done someone else's work for free.