The cognitive debt of LLM-laden coding extends beyond disengagement of our craft. We’ve all heard the stories. Hyped up, vibed up, slop-jockeys with attention spans shorter than the framework-hopping JavaScript devs of the early 2010s, sling their sludge in pull requests and design docs, discouraging collaboration and disrupting teams. Code reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as they come to the crushing realization that they are now the first layer of quality control instead of one of the last. Asked to review; forced to pick apart. Calling out freshly added functions that are never called, hallucinated library additions, and obvious runtime or compilation errors. All while the author—who clearly only skimmed their “own” code—is taking no responsibility, going “whoopsie, Claude wrote that. Silly AI, ha-ha.”

— Simon Højberg, The Programmer Identity Crisis