Hunting the Shmoo

You felt it. The shift. That your role has fundamentally changed thanks to LLMs. It first entered your subconscious when you realized how easily you can now crank out PRs. You felt it more concretely (and less enthusiastically), as a reviewer when you opened your laptop one morning and noticed your review queue was double what it normally is thanks to everyone else cranking out PRs. And you feel this pervasive, general sense of friction.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where this friction is coming from. Depending on the repository size and CI setup, it will be slightly different for everyone. It might involve longer review times or slipping review standards. You might be noticing more merge conflicts and merge related CI failures. Perhaps there are more failures sneaking through to main or CI is taking longer to give you results. You almost certainly feel the grind. People are on edge, tired; developers are pulling in opposite directions.

Here’s what LLMs shifted. The bottleneck is no longer producing code. The bottleneck is integrating it. The friction we’re feeling is a result of more PRs, more ideas, more reviews, more disagreements all made possible thanks to LLMs. In short, the problem can best be summarized by Figure 1:

But we’re living in a moment where many folks haven’t realized this yet, and are still under the impression that their job is to produce code.

It’s not. Your new job is to integrate it.