GoKawiilIt's 2020. You're the most senior person on your team, in charge of code quality and architecture. You've set up good engineering practices, you thoroughly review PRs from people who are less experienced than you and work hard to maintain a healthy codebase.
Then at some point, you go on holiday. When you come back, the codebase is a mess. Everyone merged each other's PRs without really paying much attention, someone added a bunch of new tables to the database to denormalise it because it was easier and they added serverless or Kafka to the stack without any solid evidence that they needed either.
It's okay. You can fix this.
Fast forward to 2026. You haven't been on holiday. It's just a normal Monday morning. You make yourself a nice coffee, open your computer and find yourself with 7 PRs to review. You open the first one: +24506 -3938 lines, accompanied by some AI-generated description of what they're supposed to do. Somehow, your team has made more changes since Friday than they used to make while you were away for a few weeks.
AI removed the speed limit
AI makes projects with weak engineering culture fail much faster.
There used to be a time when people sat down and talked about how they'd do something. Now they can just prompt an agent for a few hours and open a PR.
The most tragic aspect of this way of working is that, to the untrained eye, it works.
If you pull the branch and test it, you'll probably get something somewhat functional. So what do they do? They keep going. Again and again. Until the project reaches a point where no one knows how anything works.
Just like someone buying a new luxury car on a credit card. You don't see the debt. You just see the car that looks great.
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