How to deal with reviewing AI slop code as a senior engineer?
Hi devs! I am a senior engineer and new to this sub. I have a question that's been bothering me for quite a while and I can't seem to find a solution to it after trying multiple things.
How do you guys are handling code review of AI slop code generated by your peers or juniors? TBH it feels mentally draining to review AI slop code which often times is too verbose and leave gaps in business logic/or adds extra over-engineering techniques. Now I know that the way you provide context matters a lot but no one seems to follow that in my team and devs are generating PRs at the speed of light 😭
I have mentioned this to my juniors and peers in meetings and 1-1 to self-review the PR before raising it. Guess what, they are doing that with AI as well. Now if you don't provide correct context to the model, the results and review are all gonna be same. Within few clicks they are generating bad PRs.
On top of it, the company is pushing to use AI everywhere so you can imagine the timelines are strict and devs come with excuses that if I don't do this on time, it's gonna get spilled over. I can't deny this as well.
Things that I've tried:
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Conveying them 1-1 as well in team meetings to use "human brain" more to self-review PRs and other's PR as well
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Showed them how to provide accurate context for a coding task. Not too much but not too less. Again, they followed but it's not a blueprint for all the tasks because tasks vary a lot.
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Added some common code guideline agent rules for our repos + some rules for code review. It helped a bit but is not 100% perfect.
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Talked to higher management about this, they also don't seem to find a way to convey it respectfully and suggests to use some hard measures, which I'm not so sure about.
Would love to hear from the dev community on how are they approaching this problem.
Posted Sep 23, 2026, 8:32 AM UTC