Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.

Start free trial →
DM Dan Moore Dan Moore On The Stack Overflow Podcast

“Why do we accept a 400-line or 4,000-line PR from AI when we wouldn't from our coworkers? Why wouldn't we go back to the AI and say, you need to break this down into ten smaller things that I can actually review and understand? Part of us learning to adjust to this new tool is building cultural norms that say, just because the AI wrote it doesn't mean you have to accept it as is.”

The Stack Overflow Podcast · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

“Why do we accept a 400-line or 4,000-line PR from AI when we wouldn't from our coworkers? Why wouldn't we go back to the AI and say, you need to break this down into ten smaller things that I can actually review and understand? Part of us learning to adjust to this new tool is building cultural norms that say, just because the AI wrote it doesn't mean you have to accept it as is.” — Dan Moore, The Stack Overflow Podcast

Context

The host had just described 'zombie code review', where reviewers wave through huge AI-generated pull requests. Dan relays a question a colleague put to him the night before.

Listen to the episode → More from Dan Moore → More Hands-On Engineering Podcasts quotes →

Transcript

The Stack Overflow Podcast Around 17:58 into the episode
Dan Moore

Yeah. LGM TM. Do they say that or do they just let it linger? Oh,

Ryan Donovan

they just kick it through. Yeah. There's the old saw: if you want a detailed code review, push 10 lines. If you wanted to prove to me, push 100. It's

Dan Moore

a bike-shedding problem. I mean, actually, I had a conversation last night with someone, and she was saying, Why do we accept that? Like, why do we accept a 400-line or 4,000-line PR from AI when we wouldn't from our coworkers? Why wouldn't we go back to the AI and say, actually, you need to break this down into like 10 smaller things that I can actually review and understand? And I think that is part of us learning to adjust to this new tool is for us to build cultural norms that say, actually, just because the AI wrote it doesn't mean you have to kind of accept it as is. You can push back the same way you would with a colleague.

Ryan Donovan

Yeah. GitHub actually had a feature roll out recently that is breaking up commits into smaller pieces.

Dan Moore

Does that do it kind of automatically or is it more like a UI? I'm

Ryan Donovan

not sure. Okay. Right by the headline. Stack

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from The Stack Overflow Podcast

“We have a couple of principles around AI agents. One is the agent needs its own identity, because if it's riding along with your identity, it's really hard to audit and really hard to differentiate. The people who let agents drive their browsers terrify me. And another is that the bounds around the agent need to be deterministic software. It's not enough to say, hey, Claude, don't break anything or be good. Because they will try to do whatever they can to accomplish their goal. That's what we've seen.” — Dan Moore, The Stack Overflow Podcast “Intelligence is overweighted on. It has been dramatically overweighted on for the past few decades at least, if not longer. There are so many things about being a person are not about how smart you are. And the more obsessed we get with our intelligence and with being the best, the more we really lose out on the journey and the joy of the … there's so much more to life than smarts.” — Charity Majors, The Stack Overflow Podcast