January 9, 2026

Lintageddon: 523 sins confessed

Pre-commit lint checks: Vibe coding's kryptonite

523 code red flags spark a comment war: lock it down or let AI cook

TLDR: A developer found 523 code-quality issues and locked the lint rules so AI can’t wiggle around them. The community split between “strict rules forever,” “use auto-fix tools,” and “does linting matter?”—a reminder that speed without guardrails breeds messy, risky software.

One dev hit “run” and the terminal screamed: 523 violations across 67 files. The autopsy blamed AI-assisted “vibe coding”—fast features, messy cleanup. Cue the comments turning into a courtroom. The strict crowd, led by seroperson, demanded immutable lint rules and automated checks in CI (continuous integration), basically a robot gatekeeper that refuses bad code. Another camp yelled: chill. Throwaway users pushed Ruff to auto-fix and format, arguing not every type needs to be perfectly labeled in Python—loose typing can be a feature, not a crime.

Then the chaos gremlins arrived. OutsmartDan dropped the spicy grenade: “If AI writes and fixes all code, does linting even matter?” The TypeScript squad chimed in with a PSA: LLMs love to silence errors by slapping on “any” types—hiding real bugs with magic tape. Meanwhile, meme lords counted the 258 “line too long” hits like someone tried to write a novel in one line, and cheered the author’s zero-trust lint vault (chmod 444) as if he’d locked the rules in Fort Knox.

Bonus drama: a cynical chorus asked if we’re reading AI-generated posts about AI-generated code for… upvotes. Underneath the noise, the community agrees on one thing: speed without guardrails breeds technical debt—the slow, expensive kind you pay back with pain.

Key Points

  • Running a first pre-commit hook revealed 523 lint violations across 67 files, including 11 critical, 125 high, and 387 medium-severity issues.
  • Top rule violations were line-too-long (258), broad-exception-caught (61), and duplicate-code (42).
  • GitClear’s 2025 research found AI-assisted projects had 4x more code clones and reduced maintainability; perceived productivity gains were offset by 19% longer timelines due to cleanup.
  • The article identifies three anti-patterns: loosening lint rules, widespread inline disables, and allowing LLMs to edit lint configurations.
  • A zero-trust approach is proposed: make lint configuration immutable (e.g., set .pylintrc read-only with chmod 444) to preserve quality standards.

Hottest takes

"Enable strict linting on CI, don't allow AI to change linting configuration" — seroperson
"If AI is writing and fixing all code, does linting even matter?" — OutsmartDan
"Is anyone else tired of AI generated blog posts about AI generated code?" — atrooo
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