My first clue was that PR description was absurdly detailed and well structured... yet the actual changes were really scattershot. A human with the experience and attention to detail to produce that detailed description would likely also have broken it down into seperate PRs.

And the code seemed alright until I noticed a small one-line change: a UI component being instantiated had been replaced comment that stated "Insantiating component now requires X"

Except the new insantiation wasn't anywhere. Their coding agent had commented out insantiating the component instead of figuring out dependency injection.

That component was the container for all of the app's settings.

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It's interesting because the PR wasn't entirely useless: individual parts of it were good enough that even if I took over the PR I'd be fine keeping them.

But whatever coded it couldn't understand architecture well enough, I suspect whoever was piloting it probably tested the core functionality and assumed their small UI changes wouldn't break anything.

I hope we normalize just admitting when most of a piece of code is AI generated. I'm not a luddite about these tools, but it also changes how I'll approach a piece of code.

Things that are easy for humans get very hard for AI, and vice versa.