ARTICLE AD BOX
New Delhi: AI coding is now very popular in this AI era, and there are many coders who are using AI coding. But what if this AI coding causes the production failure in a startup, and the employee is fired? Yes, recently the same incident came to the headlines. However, sometimes relying heavily on the AI for coding might backfire, as was the case with one Indian techie. On Reddit, one user named u/Karmaisabeachhh has shared a post on the subreddit r/DevelopersIndia.
In the shared post, the user have explained that they joined a startup as a frontend engineer, which was very AI-driven. That person later wrote that the startup was a fintech firm, though they did not name the company in that post. At the time of joining, another person joined along with them, who was eventually fired for using the AI, despite the company’s focus on AI tools.
The coworker has lacked prior internship experience, which made it more difficult to manage deadlines. At first, the manager was very supportive, but later the techie was forced to take the help of AI. The user wrote, “Initially, they were generous, and he was writing the code by hand. Eventually, they got tighter and tighter, and at one point, he had to start using the AI to meet deadlines.”
Using AI to meet those deadlines is not uncommon; most of the coders use tools like Cursor. However, the techie didn’t understand what the AI was actually doing. “He started understanding the code in chunks. So, this function basically does this, even though we don’t know how.” Manual coding often enables developers to quickly identify and resolve errors due to their familiarity with the code structure.
AI-generated code can be far more complex and harder to debug. This forced the techie to use AI to fix code made by AI. In the post, “AI does not care if the file is fifteen thousand lines wrong. But after a point, it becomes a headache even looking at those files. So, this promotes fixing further bugs through AI.”
The braking point came late one night when the Slack notification alerted the team to the production failure. It was well and good until one day, we got a Slack call at 11PM, saying something broke in production. We then had to spend the entire next day trying to find and fix the problem. We found out that the problem was in his code, the users stated.
In the investigation, it has revealed that those previous code changes had been generated using the AI tools and were merged into production by the manager, who also relied on AI for code review. Tracing the issue was described as time-consuming. Digging through all that was no easy task. He had generated some changes through Cursor before, and the manager merged them by reviewing them with AI.
And once the manager found out, the techie was sacked. The user added, “The guy was promptly fired.” The startup relied heavily on the AI, and the user was very often told to use more AI at work. The user wrote, “I have had 1:1s which were entirely about how my cursor usage was the lowest in the company, even though I have never missed a deadline.”
The most interesting part after these Reddit posts was that the users were seemingly furious with the way the techie was treated. While the techie did cause major disruption, he believed that one shouldn’t be fired after just two bugs. One comment read, “Firing over two bugs is the stupidest thing ever. A useless and toxic company.” Another user wrote that, “Lesson in how to act as a leader, firing junior as a scapegoat. The manager who merged it and set deadlines should have been promptly fired.”
English (US) ·