At work we will soon be getting access to agentic AI that parses through our gigantic code base and burns through money for very simple requests.
What would be the best way to maliciously comply with the management’s decision for AI usage to be an everyday thing you are expected to do without getting found out?
My idea is spamming the living shit out of the most expensive models for pointless tasks and then insisting that the result is wrong, and work in the meantime. Nobody can complain if my work is still good, but they will notice that the AI budget is not worth it and stop the hype train.
This is amazing because all of this is entirely useless at best and actively hostile at worst, but it’s all exactly the kinda thing the morons pushing LLMs want. This is 100Xing tech debt generation, all features no maintenance.
I kinda hate my current job, but at least I’m the only dev and the entire codebase is my own handwritten slop. Refusing to use AI at any point has basically allowed me to minimize feature creep and force all our tooling to fit in a decently modular home baked framework that only takes up ~100MB for the whole history and around 60K lines of active code (split I over about 4 or 5 separate open source repos I’m maintaining).
Half of my commits now are deleting huge portions of the codebase since I’ve noticed they aren’t used, or have been replaced over the years by better solutions. All of this runs the entire project management, design and QA suites for a 60 person fiber optic design firm.
I do have a habit of just deciding to delete modules and waiting for tickets to flow in then rewriting them on the fly, but there’s no better way to find out if something is important than deleting it in prod and waiting for complaints lol