I knew something was wrong the second the code looked… good.  Not “junior dev finally figured out indentation” good. I mean clean. Suspiciously clean. The kind of clean that whispers, “no one actually wrote me.”

Proper spacing. Thoughtful comments. Functions with names that didn’t make me question my life choices. I leaned back in my chair. “This isn’t ours.” Across the room, I hear it.

Bright. Cheerful. Unbothered.“Oh! That’s mine!”

Of course it is. Enter Chadley Codewell.

New hire. Fresh energy. Computer Science degree still warm from the printer. The kind of kid who says things like “I love refactoring” and means it. Chadley rolls over in his chair like he’s about to demo the future.

“I used AI to speed things up.” I stare at him. Then back at the code. Then back at him. “You… what?” He lights up, like I just asked him about his favorite hobby.

“Yeah! I just described what we needed and it wrote everything. It saved me, like… hours.” 

At first glance, it’s beautiful. Clean service layer. Logical structure. Even comments explaining why things are happening, which is more than I can say for half the codebase we have been inheriting from 2011.

That’s when the cracks start to show.

It begins innocently enough though. A function making a call to another helper method. Except… that method doesn’t exist anywhere. Not in this file, not in the project, not even hiding under a slightly different name. Just confidently referenced, as if reality would bend to accommodate it.

I scroll a little further, hoping that it was a one-off. Alas, It’s not.

Now we’ve got a database query sitting comfortably inside a loop, firing off requests like it’s trying to win some kind of performance anti-pattern award. No batching, no caching, just pure, unfiltered enthusiasm.

And then I see it. An API key. Hardcoded. Right there in the file, in plain text, like it belongs. No environment variable, no config wrapper, not even the courtesy of a half-hearted attempt to protect it. Just… sitting there. Existing. Waiting.

I pause for a moment and reread the comment above it, which very confidently explains how the system is “securely handling external integrations.”

I rub my temples. “Did you read this?” Chadley shrugs, still smiling. “Yeah. I mean, skimmed it. It all looked right.” 

That’s the thing about AI-generated code. It doesn’t look wrong. It looks confident. Like it’s been doing this longer than you have. Which is great… until you realize it has no idea what our system does, how our data is structured, or why that one endpoint explodes if you look at it funny.

I scroll back up to the top. The comments are pristine. // This function securely validates user input and prevents injection attacks. I glance down at the query again. It does not. Not even a little.

I look over at Chadley. “You deployed this, didn’t you?” He hesitates. Just for a second. “…it worked on my machine.” Of course it did. So does a parachute, right up until it doesn’t.