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I can share a weird story:

Usually, I take my time to understand each keyword of the code I'm looking at, especially if it is new to me, like terraform.

I work in a team/with one architect, who only did the DevOps/Infra stuff for the past years and I had the expectation he knows what he is doing and talking about.

At around 2 weeks, I noticed how his knowledge has severe gaps and how he takes things at face value or uses terminology interchangably, which confuses me. It sounds plausible, but it does not actually translate into a working system or shared understanding.

Then one day I did some pair programming with him and whenever there was an error or a resource missing, he would type it into the LLM, copy paste it out of it and then brute force error messages. He did not even wait a second to think or reconcile whats happening on the screen or what the exact requirement is. Never taking one step back and questioning any assumption.

Now that the timeline is shifting and everyone starts to be stressed, he continues to vibe code through me and it is so tiring, there is no higher level planning or architecture, its just a reactive type of trial and error to be faster. It feels like these people are so used to talking to bots, that they treat you like an agent they can chat to or talk through monologs with.

It is quite shocking how people went from being humble (learn the basics or close the gaps in understanding) to full on authority on everything and berating people 24/7...

So right now I'm considering quitting IT for a couple of years until people calm down, but I think its pretty futile

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Great comment.

At my place, this is what they want. They want people to smash through things as fast as possible. They don’t want people to sit and craft a solution which takes in to account the whole. They are choosing tools which are low code, and use llm’s to produce what they need. as they say “this is the way things are going”.

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I don't think it's generalizable. The kind of person who copy and pastes from the AI is the kind who did the same from StackOverflow before. It's more compelling, and we probably see more of them because of it, but it's the same general thing.

The kind of person who insists on understanding things and working through the problem has always been rarer. It's not "humble", it's "inquisitive" and "persistent".

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I'm seeing people who _used to be_ like that losing that understanding without realizing it's happening - they have a superficial idea of what the code is doing, enough to feel like they understand it, but the change is apparent when watching them handle something unexpected.
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LLMs reduced interest on tech debt, but it's still there and people who have a tendency to acquire it will go bankrupt eventually.
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The difference between the two is that friction is learning.

the less friction the less growth.

So even if they copied from SO they would have better knowledge than an Ai user.

This isn’t speculation either, theres an MIT study which this is based on. https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...

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> It is quite shocking how people went from being humble (learn the basics or close the gaps in understanding) to full on authority on everything and berating people 24/7...

That was never humility. That was fear. This technology is just enabling people to show their through colors. The unearned confidence is a hell of a drug.

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You captured this phenomenon very well in this comment. Appreciate you sharing it because it’s hard to describe exactly what makes this sort of behavior so bizarre.
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I don't think this is going to change because it helps automate code production. As in, once we reach a point where this method produces acceptable results, we can fire all engineers and automate the process.
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>> he continues to vibe code through me

So quit pair programming. I never did, never will do that, nor worked at a place that remotely encouraged that. Each to their own, that's how it should be.

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I saw this the past year - new employees would put problems into Claude first instead of debugging. A year back I was debug manually first, now I do the same.

The speed AI debugs at is incredible and yes, we lose touch the more we use it like any manager feet up barking orders to their underlings to get things done.

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In my mind, this, not copyright or water use, is the best reason to boycott AI. It'll make you incompetent.
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At least at my company the OKRs are quite clear and demand heavy AI utilization above all else
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