Answer to: How to deal with a programmer who acts as a proxy for AI?

Preface: most of my answer is purely speculative. My employer doesn't use AI yet, but there are plans to utilize it in the not-so-distant future, so I'm probably going to be in your shoes very soon. This is how I would approach the problem. With AI, however, it costs me much more time to do the review and to type the comment, compared to a few seconds needed to copy-paste my comments to AI. That's not a bug; that's a feature. And at least you don't need to spend time copying and pasting these comments into the chatbot; someone else does. The premise of AI (also the promise) is to dramatically reduce the time it takes to write code. That means the human will be delegating more to the machine. If we are to believe the hype (and the machine delivers on this hype) then we, as software engineers, will play more of a supervisory role to agentic AI. I think this basically means "human does code review." Since AI is not deterministic, I can see a period of experimentation become necessary before agentic AI can be fully realized. Humans need to learn how to work with the machine to maximize output, and perhaps the "vibe coder" at this point can be seen as an intermediate step in this process. From an engineering perspective, pretend the human isn't there and consider the code mostly AI-generated. It sounds like you have someone with experience supervising this thing, so you've got that going for you. If the human isn't providing much benefit, then the next thing I'm thinking about is how to eliminate the extraneous human in the loop and more fully embrace agentic AI. I'm not advocating for firing this person (labor laws not withstanding). Instead, you will probably need to sip the Kool-Aid just a little. This extra "human in the loop" might be a suitable candidate to supervise other AI agents, making this a force multiplier. Ok, maybe that's a bit more than a sip of the Kool-Aid, but I did warn you this answer was speculative. I just think we are in the "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" phase of deploying artificial intelligence. It's an experiment: how much human oversight is required to use AI effectively? Consider that you are evaluating a tool rather than the human submitting the code review, because the tool has not been granted full access to all the auxiliary IT systems necessary to complete the task independently.