The Copilot Delusion

[erronis]

https://deplet.ing/the-copilot-delusion/

Putting this here under Open Source and Free Software since there doesn't seem to be a good place to discuss some of the larger issues in computers today - especially "AI".

As most coders know, TL;DR;

This is a wonderful piece of writing about the use of these coding "agents" and the prats and pitfalls thereof. The embrace of these seems to be enormous. I've not asked them to write my code, but many of the context-sensitive help features within our IDEs do use the same concepts to suggest possible completions, etc.

Disclaimer: This post was written May 2025, and the arguments apply to AI code capabilities at this time. The arguments around lack of competence are certainly likely to become less prevalent-while the parts about the desecration of the joys of programming, and fundamental human understanding of programming-are likely to become more prevalent as AI coding improves.
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 shiny new JS framework that he’ll try to shove down my throat next week. Meanwhile, I’m left spelunking through callback hell with a flashlight made of regret.

My boss corners me.
"Why aren’t you pairing more with him? He types twice as fast as you."

Of course he does. So does a cat having a seizure on a mechanical keyboard. But that doesn’t mean it should be writing production code.

I kept pushing myself. Learning infrastructure, refining my mental models, sweating over trade-offs. And him? He googled. He skimmed. He pasted. Occasionally he’d show off a clever trick; half-correct and contextless. Yet the team would ooh and aah like cavemen discovering fire.

And I got lazy. Of course I did. When the system forces you to code with a hallucinating clown, eventually you stop resisting. You let him type. You let him be "productive." You check out. You surrender your brain to the noise and just float.

Captain Obvious is here to Save the Day.
I wasn’t talking about a programmer. I was describing GitHub Copilot. Or Claude Codex. Or OpenAI lmnop6.5 ultra watermelon.

. . .