

An example from work a few weeks ago. I fixed some vibe coded UI code that had made it to prod. The layout of the UI was basically just meant to be an easy overview of information relevant to an item. The LLM had done everything right except it assumed a weird mix of tailwind and bootstrap, mixing and matching css classes from both. After I implemented the classes myself it went from a single column view to grids and nested grids grouping the data intuitively. I talked with the dev who implemented it, and basically it was just something quickly cobbled together with AI until it was passable. The AI had added a lot of extra that served no function and that didn’t conform to a single css framework, but looked like it could. For months noone questioned it despite talk about that part of the UI needing a facelift.
I don’t know how representative it is, but about half the time I’m thoroughly confused about a piece of code and why it was written the way it was, the answer has turned out to be AI. And unlike when a developer wrote it, there rarely is any reason to have written it the weird way.
I were unfortunate enough to get an assignment about sending messages to ServiceNow through a REST interface. The company had a team that managed ServiceNow, so I set up a meeting with one of the people there to get read access to the test environment so I could confirm that it worked. The person invited, then invited a coworker who in turn invited the manager of their department. During the meeting we got established how little they wanted my team to do anything that could affect the system due to how easy it was to make mistakes that took weeks or months to fix, how complicated it was and how many years it took to be proficient in. The whole thing was basically a lecture on how unequiped our team was to manage their system and how they didn’t want us to break it with changes we weren’t planning on making anyway. It took a few meetings after that to get credentials and when I got them I got admin access for some reason. That experience left me wondering why ServiceNow was even being used as it sounded like a liability more than anything else.