The Copilot Delusion

Summary

Chapter 1: My Coworker, The Programmer A shell of a man—more of a parrot than a person. My boss, a true believer in the sacred rite of Pair Programming, chained myself and this "programmer"-colleague together like conjoined twins from different planets. We shared a keyboard, but not a brain. Lord, not even close. "Hold up. I’ve got an idea. Gimme the keyboard real quick." An idea. Yes. The same way a toddler has “an idea” to stick a fork in a wall socket. I was halfway through constructing something beautiful—a lean, elegant piece of logic that sliced through complexity like a blade through butter—and here he comes, pounding the keyboard like it owes him money, pasting in code he Frankensteined from a stack overflow comment written by an Uncle Bob disciple in 2014. Did he know what our system did? No.Did he read the ticket? Absolutely fucking not.Did he feel confident mutating global state with reckless abandon? He absolutely fucking did. I’m doing some refactoring. Tightening the bolts, cleaning up component trees, re-aligning the chakras of the system. Suddenly:"Hey, I added a useEffect that refetches everything when anything changes. Cool, right?" "Why?" I ask, blinking like a hostage on a tape sent home from a military operation gone wrong. "It fixed the thing," he says. "Where the thing wasn’t working. It's a working thing now." A chaos monkey disguised as a teammate. No tests. No profiling. No understanding of side effects or performance impact. Just blind clicking and tapping and typing. The programming equivalent of punching your TV to make the static stop. And he did this with everyone. A one-man bug factory. Whispering half-formed solutions into the ears of juniors like a sick, twisted full-stack Rasputin. Apparently, friendly fire will be tolerated. The system explodes. Nothing deploys. The UI is frozen like the vegetables in my freezer I was supposed to defrost 8 years ago. And where is my dear co-pilot? Nowhere. He’s vanished—probably reading about a sh...