484
Tech's Dumbest Mistake: Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything
(defragzone.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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Technology
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I work for a fortune 500 company.
just recently lost a principal engineer that built an entire platform over the last four years.
just before they left I noticed they were using AI an awful lot. like...a lot a lot. like, "I don't know the answer on a screen share so I'll ask ChatGPT how to solve the problem and copy/paste it directly into the environment until it works" a lot.
they got fired for doing non-related shit.
it's taken us three months, hundreds of hours from at least 5 other principal engineers to try to unravel this bullshit and we're still not close.
the contributions and architecture scream AI all over it.
Point is. I'll happily let idiots destroy the world of software because I'll make fat bank later as a consultant fixing their bullshit.
That's what I expect if I'm fired and rehired: at least +25% on my salary.
We hired a junior at work from a prestigious university. He uses ChatGPT all the time but denies it. I know that because all his comments in the code are written like some new Tolkien book. Last time I checked his code, I told him it had something like 20 bugs and told him how to fix that because I'm not a bad guy. The next day, he came back with a program that was very very different. Not knowing how to apply my fixes, he used another prompt and the whole thing was different with new bugs. I told my boss I was not wasting time on that shit again.
There's also the tribal knowledge of people who've worked somewhere for a few years. There's always a few people who just know where or how a particular thing works and why it works that way. AI simply cannot replace that.
I don't disagree with that, but there's so many "wtf is this shit" moments that defy all logic and known practices.
like for example, six different branches of the same repo that deploy to two different environments in a phased rollout. branches 1-3 are prod, 4-6 are dev. phases go 3,1,2 for prod and 6,4,5 for dev. they are numbered as well.
also, the pipelines create a new bucket every build. so there's over 700 S3 buckets with varying versions of the frontend....that then gets moved into....another S3 bucket with public access.
my personal favorite is the publicly accessible and non-access controlled lambdas with hard-coded lambda evocation URLs in them. lambda A has a public access evocation URL configured instead of using API Gateway. Lambda B has that evocation URL hard coded into the source that's deployed.
there's so much negligent work here I swear they did it on purpose.
Depending on the place, it's the "work insurance" - companies would usually think twice before firing the only person who can understand the spaghetti. Now they won't need said person to generate "working" code
Institutional knowledge takes years to replace.