The hallucinatory praise for them around me has severely affected my mental health at work.

I can envision in some narrow scenarios they can help with automatic generation. Honestly, we always had IDE tools to do some of that. But so many people at my work - people who I’ve otherwise had a lot of trust in - are obsessed with it, even when every time I use it, it churns forever, or turns out terrible results.

Recently my senior was proud to demonstrate an initiative where he’d been working with AI to make our unit tests run ten times faster. I looked at the code, and what he did basically tasted only a tenth of the things the original did because of what it stripped out. I explained that to him, and later in the day he admitted he’d been lead down a rabbit hole of bad optimization.

This was a guy I look up to, who I’d ask questions of all the time in my first year of working there. And meanwhile we have management personnel literally getting upset when our engineers don’t turn to AI first to solve a problem.