I've become increasingly frustrated with having to work with other people's AI-"assisted" code. I can tell when I depart from reading sensible human-written code and enter the land of Copilot where all bets are off. Just yesterday I discovered that some environment variables someone had configured on a service weren't actually doing anything, because the service didn't support being configured via environment variables, let alone those particular ones. It's stuff like that which really gets me about all this: you can no longer assume a coherent theory of mind behind what you're reading. You can no longer trust that because something looks specific and intentional (like environment variable names), that it actually came from reality and not a confabulation. It's breaking the social contract that makes collaboration work.

LLMs seem good at replacing off-shore and very Jr. devs. That’s about it so far. We’ll see if they can get over this current stagnation.