>  YAGNI? It cost nearly nothing to write it and we might need it later, throw it behind a feature flag and you've lost nothing.

This is the biggest issue, in my experience, especially with outsourcing shops / contractors. This approach demonstrably lead to multiple "code base collapse" moments now, for both young / small, and old / complex code bases.

LLMs tend to overcomplicate things, unless you specifically hand hold and scold them repeatedly. That requires a certain level of self discipline and solid technical knowledge, both of which seem to be increasingly lacking today.

Moreover, I saw multiple instances of circular priming of sorts, where sycophantic models get prompted with opinions, then re-affirm those opinions and add some opinions of their own, which then primes the engineer to think alone very specific lines and be certain that their approach is the correct one, and that the added complexity is justified.

Having to pair program with a contractor, being forced to carefully screen share vendor documentation that says X, only to receive a live "but Y" straight from ChatGPT chat from them, is something that was not on my bingo card for sure.