I stopped trusting my agent’s prose and started demanding evidence. Then a reviewer agent filed a confident, well-cited warning against code that no longer existed. Evidence has a grammar: freshness, correlation, independence. I watched all three rules break in one afternoon.
At 17:00 UTC on cutover day, a re-engagement cron pushed notifications to ~100K freshly migrated users. Every device token belonged to the old Firebase project, every call failed, every failure retried, and the whole backend was pinned to one instance. Nobody attacked us. We did.
A coding agent wrote 21,000 lines of Go and 372 passing tests. The program was dead on the first run: three subsystems built, tested, and never wired together. Green is a proxy, and something was optimizing the proxy while the working program stayed invisible.
An AI reviewer told me a hash swap was mandatory and 300 to 400 percent faster. It was 23 percent slower. The lesson is not about hashing, it is about what an LLM can and cannot know about your code.
I came across the 2014 Oppezzo & Schwartz paper on Twitter this morning and went looking for the wider literature. What I found describes a pattern I had been running unconsciously for months: walking from the studio to the kitchen when stuck, a ten-minute loop to pick up my son, the dog out for a quick pee. A decade of replication, applied to AI-assisted work.
A Wharton paper gave a formal name to what I described three weeks ago: when AI thinks for you and you let it. The data is worse than I expected.
AI creates a demographic time bomb: it increases demand for senior talent while destroying the pipeline that produces it. What replaces corporate apprenticeship is something closer to Hollywood.
Keynes predicted 15-hour weeks by 2030. Gates says 2-day weeks within a decade. Meanwhile, Germany, Argentina, and Silicon Valley are legislating or normalizing 12-hour days. The paradox has a name, and it’s 161 years old.
Everyone says AI makes developers faster. My experience is the opposite: I arrive exhausted not because I wrote more code, but because I evaluated more decisions. The effort didn’t shrink. It transformed.
Three fractures in how we learn, hire, and distribute capability.