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> Today, a bad engineer can churn out ten thousand lines of garbage that actually compiles and runs, before my first cup of coffee. If not on a tight leash, they'll sink the whole codebase or inundate every senior person with garbage code review requests. The blast radius is unlimited!

The term for that is "10x AI engineer." Anyone who has anything negative to say about such people is just jealous of their insane productivity and speed.

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The supposed “10x engineer” may simply be someone stealing productivity from everyone around them.

You measure the output of one person while ignoring the cost they impose on their team.

If I generate 10 PRs in a day but three engineers now have to spend the next two days reviewing them, figuring out what I changed, correcting bad assumptions, debugging regressions and explaining why half of it needs to be redone, I haven’t become 10x more productive. I’ve just moved the work onto other people.

Worse, I’m consuming the time of the people who are usually the hardest to replace and whose attention is already scarce.

That’s why PR count, lines changed or features “completed” are terrible measures of productivity. You can make your own numbers look incredible while reducing the throughput of the entire team.

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FYI, your comment showed up as [dead] like you were banned until I vouched for it, but I don't see any reason for that. Just thought I'd let you know in case you want to follow up.
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> You can make your own numbers look incredible while reducing the throughput of the entire team.

Taken how some companies award promotions and bonus this is actually a double win. You not only improve your own numbers but also make this of your competition worse! /s

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If your company has bad engineers cranking out 10,000 line PRs your engineering culture and product was already bad, I guarantee it.
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It's not the whole culture and product, it's specific teams that do it. And trying to push back on teams that are "producing" is not a simple task.
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Sadly AI also amplifies both the good and the bad managers and tech leads. If you have managers who fail to set a clear direction or tech leads who fail to define a good framework for developers to operate within then AI just means the poorly directed developer effort goes further in the wrong direction faster. Meanwhile teams with well-specified goals and better structure and processes can exploit the benefits of AI tools much more effectively.
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