Post #2508579

2025-06-06 20:33 UTC

Since I&#39;ve left my last job, I&#39;ve been thinking about the guy who used me as an alternative to ChatGPT whenever he hit a problem that he couldn&#39;t vibe code the answer out of at work. He basically rotted his own brain by compulsively using ChatGPT in lieu of actually thinking with most any of the projects he was working on. Instead of taking the time to read through code in our framework, look up documentation, or do any sort of debugging, he instead just begged and pleaded with ChatGPT to try and get somewhere because &quot;it was faster.&quot; Basically just really hammering his brain with the Programmer&#39;s Slot Machine. (@davidgerard wrote a really good article here about this specific gambling addiction angle here. I highly highly recommend reading/watching the corresponding YouTube video: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/ ) Back to the story; When that wasn&#39;t working, which was a significant portion of the time, he&#39;d then just turn and use me as a &quot;more informed alternative&quot; to ChatGPT. I worked fully remote and the majority of our interactions was via a Teams chat. which apparently crossed some wires in his monkey brain and made him start just... Basically verbally barraging me like he would with the company ChatGPT instance. No thoughts at all, just an immediate process of: - Ask vague question - Get guess for an answer with a request for more details - Try applying the guess blindly without thinking if it&#39;s applicable at all - Have it not work and just report back that it didn&#39;t work. - No follow-up details, no further explanation of what was going on or what he&#39;s trying to do. Nothing added past the original vague situation - If lucky, I might get a screenshot of part of the error, meticulously sliced before it gave something useful in the output because he stopped reading error output to things and made no attempt to understand it. (Why? ChatGPT can do that part!) - Rinse and Repeat until I get fed up and get into a call with him - Fix the thing in less than a minute, pointing out that he should have been able to tell what was wrong almost immediately if he actually dropped a break-point and debugged the code at *literally any point* along the way - Fuck off immediately after getting his fix, no thank you or anything - start the process anew the following day when he vibe coded himself into a corner all over again I literally had to go to leadership and make them have a talk with him and get him to leave me the fuck alone at work, after repeated attempts to establish boundaries about it, due to how much time it sucked out of me being able to work on other projects. Effectively just doubling up my work and slamming me with burn out right at the start of the year for absolutely no reason other than his belligerent insistence to just Not Do His Job Without His Hand Being Held By A Chat Window. It rapidly went from a &quot;He sometimes asks informed questions that I can answer and help him with. I enjoy working with him&quot; to &quot;The dude isn&#39;t even trying in the slightest and is now basically offloading his work onto me because he broke his capacity to actually do work independently of an external chat window. I fucking hate him and I hope he gets in a car wreck so I can get a break from the bleakness of dealing with him every goddamn morning&quot; ChatGPT has basically just been an absolute blight for me since it&#39;s inception. Going from the team being generally pro-crypto to intensely pro-genAI/LLM because their favorite scammers (er.. I mean YouTubers) had them hooked on a fantasy of some day making it Big by jumping from one Hype cycle to the next. I sincerely was very close to just finding an entirely different career path altogether because of just how incredibly shitty it was working with that team on just about anything, but lacking the job experience on the resume to land someplace else. Nobody wanted to be an actual expert, nobody really wanted to learn anything. They had their degree and ChatGPT, which means they learned all they ever will need. ...While working in an industry that tends to re-invent itself every half decade or so while half-assing solutions with an outsourced bullshit generator. 🫠 All in the name of &quot;Well it got me from point A to point B faster.&quot; and leaving it at that, despite taking significantly longer than they should have from the get go over it. I&#39;ve seen and lived what an AI Fueled future looks like: Mediocre men harassing their talented and likely autistic peers until their peers just up and fuckin leave to a different organization out of frustration and exhaustion. I think down the road, we&#39;ll be able to measure the negative impact using LLMs has on people&#39;s cognitive faculties by comparing it to horse kicks to the head, and only be exaggerating it by a little bit.

Replies (24)

@Bredroll@mas.to 2025-06-07 08:24

@dvandal@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run I've yet to see my colleagues using these tools yet, or at least admitting it. It helped that I was asked to trial it early in the year and accurately blogged (internally) it's utter dangerous uselessness for C/C++ and python.

Open ##2798921
@dzwiedziu@mastodon.social 2025-06-07 08:28

@dvandal@infosec.exchange I felt second-hand burnout and frustration from reading this… @davidgerard@circumstances.run

Open ##2798922
@arichtman@eigenmagic.net 2025-06-07 08:34

@dvandal@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run ah yea I had a colleague something like that but I don't think it was chatgpt. I would answer earnestly the first couple queries and from then each question that was clearly "you've not thought or tried anything" got an exponential backoff on reply time. They did eventually get better at their work once they realized they might be waiting hours to the next day for a reply

Open ##2798923
@KormaChameleon@tech.lgbt 2025-06-07 08:42

@dvandal@infosec.exchange there's someone on my team like this and it's especially annoying because I'm often the wrong person to ask. He's too lazy to even run git blame on whatever file he's working on

Open ##2798927
@cczona@hachyderm.io 2025-06-07 09:02

@dvandal@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run I've been baffled by how many people are willingly participating in de-skilling themselves. This is your livelihood, that you invested years and maybe $100,000+ in becoming qualified for, then you willingly let those skills be taken from you? Why??

Open ##2798928
@waywardsun@tech.lgbt 2025-06-07 09:13

@dvandal@infosec.exchange I'm working at a university, and I have already started to see the brain-killing effects of LLMs on education. So far, the internal consulting I provide has not been affected, but you paint a plausible and scary scenario: I have seen all the behaviors you describe, the vagueness, the impatience, the unwillingness to engage with the material etc. (though rarely all at once and usually not persistently). An initial part of consulting (at least my kind) is managing expectations and negotiating boundaries (this is what I can do for you - this is what you are responsible for; my time is valuable; I can't help you if you do not define your problem clearly etc.). Which means, after a couple of iterations, we generally have a working relationship. What is going to happen when a sufficient proportion of the research community will have conditioned themselves to do research as a random walk guided by a plausible idiot with infinite patience (as long as the tokens don't run out)... scary, very scary.

Open ##2798930
@tanquist@masto.ai 2025-06-07 09:42

@dvandal@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run My employer has started a committee to determine its AI policy. The person in charge emailed everyone a page of regurgitated "AI hype" (as defined by Bender & Hanna in The AI Con). She also included, as an aside, a list of concerns other employees and I have already sent to the committee. Currently people ask me to create applications rather than fix their slop. I'll take your story as a warning to be on my guard. Thank you.

Open ##2798931
@TalesFromTheArmchair@hachyderm.io 2025-06-07 10:43

@dvandal@infosec.exchange Over the course of my journey from junior software engineer to senior software engineer, I watched with a tinge of sadness as the ratio of "coding to mentoring" steadily shifted over the years... the only fun part of the latter was watching people learn. "Mentoring" without learning sounds like an utterly thankless task...

Open ##2798932
@tagomago@mastodon.social 2025-06-07 12:44

@dvandal@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run Reminded me of a very recent post by @stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe about this “vibe coding with AI” thing, where he, imo rightfully, states that we are heading to a situation were we will lose control of our coding tools if this keeps growing as intended. https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/06/05/vibe-coding-will-rob-us-of-our-freedom/

Open ##2798933
@feld@friedcheese.us 2025-06-07 22:32

@dvandal@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run social media runs on gambling addiction as well. Just one more like/boost bro! It's good people are becoming aware of these things but we need to open our eyes wider instead of just condemning the current day's punching bag of choice

Open ##2798940
@yayroos@tech.lgbt 2025-06-08 00:22

@dvandal@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run that vagueness and especially unwillingness/inability to read error messages is something i had to shake out of people when i was tutoring a first year university programming course - the fact that new programmers are going to never even learn that because they'll just make GPT read and sort out the error is frankly terrifying. Reading error messages is, in my opinion, probably the single most critical skill of basically all flavours of computer touching. Everything reports errors when it fails and reading them is the only way you as a user, administrator, developer, whatever, can figure out what's happened and why. The scary red text is your friend.

Open ##2798944
@maize@peoplemaking.games 2025-06-08 02:46

@dvandal@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run I've had this at two workplaces. In addition to the every day sexism I already face in tech, the new "not only do you serve for my benefit, I value you and your knowledge as much as a faceless AI" Quickly driving me insane.

Open ##2798946
@glyph@mastodon.social 2025-06-08 03:16

@dvandal@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run @genehack@dementedandsadbut.social it is tempting to have a Take here but really I am just sorry it is happening to you, and probably to a million other people right now. And honestly I am sorry for your colleague too. It doesn’t excuse his behavior but the environment he’s in has given him the equivalent of a brain lesion. I have the benefit of distance from this scenario of course but I can’t even summon indignation at him. I just feel pity.

Open ##2798951
@paco@infosec.exchange 2025-06-08 03:41

@dvandal@infosec.exchange if we can measure a 2025 electric vehicle in “horsepower”, and with Americans willing to use _anything_ but the metric system, horse-kicks-to-the-head seems like a reasonable metric for measuring the mental deterioration from LLM addiction. Or ECC (equine cranial concussions) if we are feeling fancy. On a serious note: great post. I think you captured some vital essences. Sorry you had to go through that.

Open ##2798955
@lesley@mastodon.gamedev.place 2025-06-08 05:06

@dvandal@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run I am fortunately enough not to have met someone like that yet, but I've met people who asked me to read their LLM session output because they don't understand what's going on, but insisted that ChatGPT can "help"

Open ##2798957
@suetanvil@freeradical.zone 2025-06-08 12:59

@dvandal@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run Ulch! This sort of thing absolutely hits my people-pleaser instincts in the wrong way. My strategies have been a) Provide general pointers rather than specific advice (e.g. "I'd look at the flurble module" or "try looking into blarp algorithms; Wikipedia has a good page on them".) b) Deliberately take some time before responding ("I was in the middle of something and didn't check Slack for a while") if their requests get too frequent.

Open ##2798959
@auxonic@ottawa.place 2025-06-08 23:57

@dvandal@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run this pattern could explain some interactions I’ve been having lately. I hadn’t even thought of people suffering from AI brain rot… I thought they were just terrible. But it fits

Open ##2798962
@hugopoi@mastodon.hugopoi.net 2025-06-09 07:45

@dvandal@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run Thanks for posting this, I didn't know about this gambling psychological effect of llm prompt.

Open ##2798964
@jonny@neuromatch.social 2025-06-09 08:26

@dvandal@infosec.exchange Holy shit you have described the exact situation i am in. I thought it was a This Guy problem bc it's very much true to how he is, but knowing this is common makes me very sad

Open ##2798965
@flaubau@gay-pirate-assassins.de 2025-06-09 09:12

@dvandal@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run leaves the question if deepseek was actually a fork attack. shortterm financially and longterm cognitively.

Open ##2798967
@dolmen@mamot.fr 2025-06-09 15:58

@dvandal@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/114649024218795319

Open ##2798968
@dexternemrod@troet.cafe 2025-06-09 19:10

@dvandal@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run Some people are already not able to find results/help with a search engine and now there is this easy way of getting "answers". So even leass reasons to learn internet basics ...

Open ##2798969
@lagrange_multipl1er@social.translunar.academy 2025-06-15 17:37

@dvandal@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run When coding, I feel like search is sometimes bad for my brain because I'm copying an example from the internet instead of reading actual documentation. If what you just described is any indication, LLMs are going to take this problem to a whole new level! 😱

Open ##2798970
@Stellar@mk.absturztau.be 2025-06-17 11:29

@davidgerard@circumstances.run @dvandal@infosec.exchange every day at my job me : ask coworker a question coworker: ask chatgpt idk chatgpt: guessing wrong forum post 13 years ago: correct anwser

Open ##2798971