Some things to expect in 2025

> A major project will discover that it has merged a lot of AI-generated code

My friend works at a well-known tech company in San Francisco. He was reviewing his junior team member's pull request. When asked what a chunk of code did, the team member matter-of-factly replied "I don't know, chatgpt wrote that"

I am fairly certain that if someone did that where I work then security would be escorting them off the property within the hour. This is NOT Okay.

To be fair I don't think someone should get fired for that (unless it's a repeat offense). Kids are going to do stupid things, and it's up to the more experienced to coach them and help them to understand it's not acceptable. You're right that it's not ok at all, but the first resort should be a reprimand and being told they are expected to understand code they submit.

I understand the point you’re trying to get across. For many kinds of mistakes, I agree it makes good sense to warn and correct the junior. Maybe that’s the case here. I’m willing to concede there’s room for debate.

Can you imagine the fallout from this, though? Each and every line of code this junior has ever touched needs to be scrutinized to determine its provenance. The company now must assume the employee has been uploading confidential material to OpenAI too. This is an uncomfortable legal risk.

How could you trust the dev again after the dust is settled?

Also, it raises further concerns for me that this junior seems to be genuinely, honestly unaware that using ChatGPT to write code wouldn’t at least be frowned upon. That’s a frankly dangerous level of professional incompetence. (At least they didn’t try to hide it.)

Well now I’m wondering what the correct way would be to handle a junior doing this with ChatGPT, and what the correct way would be to handle similar kinds of mistakes such as copy-pasting GPL code into the proprietary code base, copy-pasting code from Stack Overflow, sharing snippets of company code online, and so on.