small rant incoming
I work for a company that it’s mostly hardware focused, but we do ship some software for the final consumer including drivers and programs, to make use of said hardware.
While I am not in the software department, I held some SWE positions in previous companies for over a decade, our software isn’t very complex and I do know most of it pretty well.
Our employee just announced a new AI-only development cycle, they want all code submissions and reviews to be exclusively done by claude, effectively ending ownership of the code being shipped to customers. This is absolute madness.
Today, I received an email scheduling a workshop on how to integrate claude into vscode and how to work with the new gitflow, namely removing our authorship from commits and having al code reviews done by a LLM now.
I am just baffled at the decision.
edit: wow I’m a bit overwhelmed by the response, I did read all of you. Thanks!
I have a coworker who went full AI, and I think is actually losing it, like sees them as people. He was telling me he’s been asking chatgpt for relationship advice and how I should use it to get advice on my relationships (my wife and I are fine because I prefer talking to her than the robots).
On Friday he was spamming me with “issues” that codex found with my PR. I think he sent over 20 bulletpoints. 1 of them was a small bug that would only apply in a way far out edge case but good to fix. The rest was absolute nonsense, or evidently not an issue if a huge read it and thought about the context.
I ignored him all day, but still had to take the time to read and verify everything. At 4pm he sends me a message asking me to fix the bugs or he can have codex fix them. I told him they were nonsense and not applicable, explained each one in simple terms, then 20 minutes later I got a message “codex said there’s still these issue: <the same fucking list that he evidently didn’t read>”.
This has been going in for a while. I spend half my week fixing his AI slop that he genuinely thinks is gold. I swear 4 months ago he was a very solid developer, today I wouldn’t trust him to write an HTML page.
God I hate this. The sheer number of times I’ve heard “and I didn’t even write a line of code” and I have to bite back the “yeah, I can fuckin’ tell.”
That’s really sad… That is worse than what I thought was annoying at my work today. Claude indicated something was an issue that has been “an issue” for years and never actually been an issue. It suggested over engineering the fuck out of something we just plainly don’t need to do. I was annoyed we spent 10+ minutes talking about that. What you described is so much worse 😬
He’s not alone.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/202507/the-emerging-problem-of-ai-psychosis
It can happen to anyone.
I think the first documented cases were inside Google, from scientists who know exactly how they work:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/ai-consciousness-how-to-recognize-1.6498068
I seem to remember a debacle earlier than 2022, but can’t find it… but point is, I suspect its quite a human psychological vulnerability. So if they recover, I wouldn’t be too hard on your coworker.
I think the easiest way to make an immediate change is to never call/talk to, or about it, as you would a person.
I dont use LLMs at all, but my wife does an i always correct her to say “It said…” when she tells me “He said…” every time she uses it instead of google to get an answer. (And then tell her to find me a trusted website that backs up the LLM as well)
Dehuminise it so theres always a part of your brain treating it as a machine/device, not a person you can trust.
Its like saying “my car broke down, she isnt feeling well”. The car broke down, it needs a part, do i trust my car? Usually but i wont be suprised if it doesnt work some times.
And i dont expect it to be able to swim if i try make it instead of using the vehicle i should have been using.