AIpidemic, a condition where the patient still has a brain, technically, but has outsourced its warranty to a chatbot.
Symptoms include: asking “what should I ask in this meeting to sound smart” before the meeting, and confusing “I pasted the stack trace into Claude” with “I understand the bug.”
Let’s write the scripture this plague deserves.
Because three months from now, “git blame” will point straight at you, and “idk, the robot wrote it” is not a valid entry in a postmortem.
It’s just been sitting on the bench so long it forgot it knows how to play. Put it back in the game before it atrophies into a decorative skull ornament.
This is the managerial equivalent of hiring a ghostwriter to text your therapist. If you need a script to sound competent, the problem isn’t your vocabulary.
Code review is a relationship, not a relay race where you’re just the guy/girl holding the baton between two AIs. If your entire managerial contribution is Ctrl+V, HR should really be reviewing you.
The model will explain your bug beautifully, with impeccable grammar, complete confidence, and total conviction — and still be wrong. Charisma is not a compiler.
“The AI said it was fine” has never once held up in an incident report, a court of law, or a marriage.
If your takes, your code reviews, and your birthday toast all have the same faint smell of RLHF (Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback), it might be the time for an intervention to yourself. Or at least the time you touch a keyboard without assistance.
Drafting an email? Fine, delegate away. Deciding whether to fire someone, sign a contract, or diagnose a patient or submitted code? That one’s still yours. Accountability doesn’t have an API.
Being excellent at asking ChatGPT/Claude about kidneys/code does not make you a nephrologist/coder. It makes you someone who’s very good at asking ChatGPT about kidneys/code.
Call it a fire drill for your own cognition. If you fail it, that’s not a productivity gap. That’s the AIpidemic, and it’s already stage two.
The tragic irony, of course, is that half the people this list is aimed at will paste it into an AI and ask it to explain why it’s funny.
Amen.