A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Slopocalypse

0:00This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. A hitchhiker's guide to the Slowpocalypse by Deploy Friday. First of all, don't panic. This has nothing to do with robots coming for your job, or some sort of AI uprising. The Slowpocalypse represents the point where AI writes code faster than anyone can review it. It's entirely survivable, though, but you won't survive it through sheer willpower, and you sure as heck won't pull through by promising yourself you will review more carefully next sprint. I mean, be honest, you'll still merge that code, because you have 14 other tabs open and deadlines breathing down your neck. But multiply all those AI shenanigans by a week in the number of your team members. You, my friend, have you got yourself a Slowpocalypse? Good news is, there is a solution. Greater than TLDR the Slowpocalypse is AI producing code faster than you can review it. Greater than nothing too crazy and unmanageable and certainly not worth banning AI over. Greater than greater than keep the few simple daily habits in sync with your

1:02review rhythm, and you'll greater than survive Slowpocalypse just fine. Why, just review carefully, fails. Every anti-slop listicle, including the one's yours truly has written, tells you to keep PR small and read every diff. That's solid advice, 100% something you should store in your muscle memory when reviewing PRs. But what happens at scale when you get 10 plus AI assisted PRs before a stand-up, discipline alone won't cut it? The fix is to keep the discipline and add the rules that fire weather or not your paying attention. Think of it as cheap PR insurance. Setting tripwires, Houston, we have a problem. Just kidding, no need to ping Houston every time something looks a bit off. That gets tiring fast. There are four simple alerts that catch the majority of Slop before it makes its way into code. Tripwire would it catch a sensible starting rule oversized PR unreviewable mega-change fire when a PR passes approximately 400 changed lines or approximately 10 files zero review merge rubber stamp and self-merge Slopfire when a PR merges with no approving review critical

2:07file change scary edits to auth, billing, migrations, or continuous integration. See, can figure fire on any change to a watch path stale PR AI generated PRs left to rot fire when a PR sits open or idle past and days you can build these yourself with the GitHub API and some webhooks. If you enjoy maintaining glue code, go for it. But you can also just set the months in Git dailies with its alert builder, scope each rule per team, repo, or label, and route them to the right person in Slack. Remember, the huge PR announces itself instead of hiding. Greater than warning guard your critical pads first. Slop in a read me is not in the same league greater than a Slop in an auth check, a payment path, or a database migration. The former greater than is a nuisance. The latter is a full-fledged migraine. Read one thing every morning. Ah, the morning habits. Atomic habits if you will. Reading every diff by hand. The dream. Too bad it's impossible to keep up with it during a week from hell. Reading a short summary of what has changed and what needs

3:10your attention is a much more feasible option. A daily report listing your open PRs, the reviews that are waiting on you, and anything that triggered an alert is enough to keep a solo dev, or a whole team, oriented. Git dailies can send these by email, Slack, or Telegram. A light version of the good, old habit of reading your team's code every day. Watch two numbers, not 20. During the slow-pocalypse, two signals do most of the heavy lifting. Time to merge. When it collapses toward zero, your reviews are as good as rubber stamps. Git dailies explains the metric in the time to merge piece. Change failure rate. One of the four door metrics, it gets you to ask, is the fast code actually breaking things? If you haven't come across it before, the door a guide is a plain English must read. As you can see, you don't need a wall of dashboards. Git dailies also shows you where PRs pile up across repos in Teams, which is how you find a review bottleneck. Set up in 90 seconds. I know, I know, you can assemble every tripwire and report mentioned above by hand, but why bother?

4:15The big Legos aren't meant for production metrics. If you'd rather not babysit glue code, install the ReadOnly GitHub app from Git dailies PR metrics in 90 seconds. Pick your repos and get the daily reports, daily digest, and PR plus door metrics. And remember, don't panic. Just set the tripwires in advance. FAQ, what actually catches eyes slop before it merges, automated alerts on oversized PRs, zero review merges, changes to critical files, and stale PRs. They fire without you having to remember to look. Can these alerts work without a tool reading my source code? Yes. PR size, reviews, merge timing, and file paths all live in GitHub metadata. Git dailies, for example, works from metadata alone and never reads your source. How is this different from just reviewing carefully? Careful review is advice that relies on your attention just as much on a bad day as on a good one. Tripwires in a daily digest are systems that work when your attention runs out. Do I need a paid plan to start? No. Git dailies has a

5:20free community tier, 50 PRs a month, unlimited users, that covers the core alerts and daily digest. You only need pro $49 per month for full DORA metrics and unlimited private alert rules. Thank you for listening to this Hackernoon story, read by artificial intelligence. Visit Hackernoon.com to read, write, learn, and publish.