Devs Who Just Paste AI Output Should Be Fired, This Engineer Argues
Being a meat proxy for AI should be grounds for getting people fired
A software engineer vents that some colleagues now act as pure "meat proxies" for AI: they prompt an agent, paste the raw output back with no review or disclosure, and sometimes dodge responsibility when it breaks production. This wastes teammates' time, forces others to validate unreviewed code, and floods repos with vibe-coded PRs that look productive to managers. He argues the behavior should be punished, up to termination in serious cases.
This is getting so insane that I've even had cases where I would DM someone on Slack and notice right away that I'm talking to an AI.
- dawnerd
It’s wild to me how many software engs never want to see code again. IMO they should just retire so someone else that does want to look at code can take the job. The laziness is unreal, all while the same people acting like they’re productive.
- atmosx
I haven't looked at the author's age, etc. But calling for someone to be fired is "not okay". I understand that we live in a polarized world and I understand the frustration but it's still "not ok" for this titles to float around. They feed the beast and that's that.
ps. The assumption is that there was empathy at play to begin with, which realistically speaking many people don't have. They would be calling for co-workers to be fired on several grounds: merit (or "merit"), skill, color-skin, dna, etc.
- ygouzerh
> Wasting your time... Forcing you to do their work for them
The one forced to do their work for them, are the teammates. Not the manager. The manager only care of it to be done. How it is done: doesn't matter.
I would argue that one of the main reason for meat proxy, is security boundaries.
In the majority of companies with a certain scale, no one can run an AI agent that will do the project from A to Z. You always need to raise at one point ticket to someone else, a human, it cannot even be done by an automated system (technically it could of course, but acceptable by governance... unfortunately no) .
- dkrich
This is written for devs but the same applies to many areas of knowledge work. In my company one of the negative side effects of widespread AI adoption is that the worst performers or people with the least understanding of what’s being done (and typically generally lazy if we’re being honest) have adopted AI tools to do everything- review and summarize documents they should be reading, drafting emails and design documents, and in many cases writing messages to team members.
The company seemingly has no issues with this as it’s almost always blatantly obvious that AI was used for the output.
For example, Copilot has a very distinctive and obvious color scheme and format it uses for Word documents and diagrams that are almost always orders of magnitude more complicated than is warranted (which makes all of this coming from people who have zero understanding of what we’re doing even more absurd).
Nevertheless they do it every day and send AI-generated summaries of documents out to the team for review without even reading them first. I’ve railed against this for nearly two years to the point it’s nearly driven me mad but so strong is the AI adoption religion that suggesting that it’s poor practice feels like blasphemy and by suggesting real work be done that I’m somehow doing things the wrong way.
This has allowed these types of people to remain in their jobs and thrive and so when the AI bubble finally bursts I fear it will reveal largely hollowed out companies where top lower l […]
- darkwater
In my experience, this kind of developer was always the one taking shortcuts, generating bad code and tech debt and in general just thinking about the ticket they were working on and nothing else.