I’m so tired on this AI copilot BS

This is just a rant. I’m a dev at a large US company. So a few days ago I got a request from one of our junior guys to help with a project that he was making. It’s a small app that he coded in VS 2022 and a Windows API he was using was giving him strange results. I asked him about that APi and right from the get go it didn’t make sense to use it there. Eventually I asked him to share the source code. At first it made sense what he was doing in the beginning but then at about 1/4 mark, I started losing track of the code flow. It was going from north to south in one if statement to another.

Then I finally gave up and asked him to explain what he was doing at this and that spot in code. The conversation went over Teams chat btw.

So I would ask him, “why are using the ThingEmABob api at line 45?” And the response I would get would be close to a lecture of what that APi is doing.

Eventually I realized that the guy is copy-and-pasting my questions into one of those AI slop generators (aka Copilot / ChatGPT) and then copy-and-pastes its answers back to me.

I got super annoyed with that. Because not only he wasted a good chunk of my time on reviewing this AI generated nonsense but he was also making me talk to AI indirectly. I responded eventually that I will walk up there and see him type that code in person. After which the guy didn’t respond for a while and then admitted to using copilot to “suggest” how to write it.

I think companies should institute a policy against this kinda behavior. It may also be quite dangerous if devs begin pushing that type of code into production. (Which I’m sure have happened already.)

https://redd.it/1opv1ik
@r_cpp