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At a company that ranks employees on an AI-usage leaderboard, an engineer secretly checked out a parallel copy of the Go repository and had an AI rewrite the entire codebase in Zig on the side, purely to generate visible AI-usage metrics and protect their job.

An engineer describes gaming an internal AI-usage leaderboard by having an AI needlessly rewrite an entire codebase in a different language just to appear sufficiently AI-driven. ✦ AI generated

anonymous engineer · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-19 · original ↗

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Checking out a parallel copy of our Go repository and telling the AI to rewrite the whole thing in Zig while I work on something else just so I can keep my job.

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✳ Go ✳ Zig

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In practice · 2

Teams using AI to fix bugs repeatedly end up depending on the AI (e.g., Claude) for answers, and then cannot tell whether anything the AI outputs is actually true.Florian Herrengt · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 60%People who blindly copy and paste the output of AI systems to their peers are 'meat puppets'.Niklas Gruhn · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 60%