Imagine you’re a software engineer. Yes, it’s a thing we all have to imagine real hard some days. Picture some tech debt with a base function of your domain, where the boundary has been overshot into a nearby field. It needs to be brought into the correct service, so you start by copying and pasting the method so you can refine around it.
Except you don’t, do you? It’s mid-2026, Grandad, and you’re a 1.3x to 1.35x developer thanks to the Power Of AI, so you tell a majestic-sounding “frontier model” to do it and instead of using a tool call to copy and paste, it sloppies and pastes it across. No accuracy, no post-sloppy review, just pure new-fashioned LLM approximation.
As with a lot of LLM approximations, it looks mostly correct. The tests it wrote itself pass (the irony isn’t missed), and much like other changes it’s done to use up your GitHub Copilot requests before token-based charging eats your face for its breakfast, it seems that another ticket has been completed.
Three sets of human eyeballs determine the feature to have been relocated. Since you’re a scaredy-cat, you even manually test a bunch of scenarios in staging - except coincidentally the one with the bug - and ragdoll it into production. The next work day costs six people a combined 30 hours to do caretaking around the blast area. You mumble “where’s AI now?” as you metaphorically sweep the chaos-induced trash into a bin and put metaphorical sawdust on the metaphorical vomit.
An Agentic Developer, 2026
You feel valued now, as you are needed to fix the mess that you allowed it to mess. Truly brilliant, Circle of Life type stuff. The issue that a human would have easily avoided was the removal of one ternary operator that was kind of crucial in configuring certain users correctly. An “agentic paste” of course rewrites it, and randomly dropped that clause on its way. So proud; your first agentic bug.
No matter how good it looks, you still can’t trust any tiny thing the magic box does. As it happens, it might not even be actual magic! It might just be box. The box had been performing well until that point, but with the fallout from this change it’s nearly negated any time savings it gave us over the past few months. Naughty box.
The end of the “first one’s free” heavily subsidised token ride will also sort some of this out, with a more balanced approach than the industry’s previous experimentation into sanitymaxxing. The more expensive a sloppy and paste gets, the less likely we’ll all be willing to accept them.