Quoting Florian Herrengt
Simon Willison’s Weblog Simon Willison
Opinion — commentary, not a factual news event.
AI keeps getting asked to fix the same bug, and nobody knows where the data comes from. That’s the trap: the code gets more tangled, not more understandable.
Based on reporting by Simon Willison’s Weblog, Simon Willison — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
A quoted warning from Florian Herrengt lands on a familiar kind of mess: a bug turns up, the team tries to fix it, and then tries again with AI, and still doesn’t really know what’s going on. The story starts with a weird bug that has already defeated three repair attempts before anyone even gets to the point of asking the machine for help.
What makes the quote sting is the next step. The person who worked on the feature can’t explain where the data comes from, so they ask Claude instead. That is a very specific kind of failure, and it’s not about one tool being weak. It’s about a team losing the map to its own system.
Herrengt’s point is that the project has grown so twisted, with so many layers and services, that nobody on the team can quickly reconstruct how it works. AI can produce a lot of text. It can even sound certain. But certainty is not understanding, and a long confident answer does not mean the codebase has become any less opaque.
The quote frames this as a shift in software work itself. Once the middle of the stack gets complicated enough, the people in the room stop being able to explain the thing they’re building. Then the machine joins the conversation, and everyone watches the wall of text scroll by, hoping it knows more than they do.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the bill coming due for “AI will handle the boring parts” thinking. If nobody understands the system, the model is just another fast way to produce confident nonsense, which is a lovely upgrade if the goal is anxiety with autocomplete. The real problem isn’t AI; it’s software teams treating understanding like an optional extra and then acting surprised when the machine can’t replace it.
Read more about this at: Simon Willison’s Weblog