I see it everywhere now. AI code. Code that pretends to be written by a person, but isn’t. You can smell it if you’ve been around code long enough.
It’s too clean. Too eager to please. Every function name is a sentence. Every comment explains the obvious, like it’s written by someone explaining programming to a golden retriever. Sometimes there’s even an emoji in there. An emoji. In code.
Real code has scars. You can see where someone tried something stupid at two in the morning, got it working, and never touched it again. There’s a weird indentation that no one can explain. Variable names start sensible, then drift into chaos. Half a function is commented out “just in case.”
AI code doesn’t have any of that. It’s sterile. Polished. It’s code written by something that has never had to hit a deadline, swear at a compiler, or hack together a fix five minutes before a demo. It never just says “fuck it, ship it.”
Want to spot it fast? Read the comments. If they sound like a grinning intern who just discovered Stack Overflow and thinks you need your hand held every step of the way, it’s probably machine-made. It’s the kind of ‘helpful’ that makes you yell, “I can read the damned code!”
Once you notice it, you’ll see it everywhere. And then you’ll realise something worse: one day, it might be all you see. Code with no scars. No fingerprints. Inhuman. Code written in human-readable syntax by a machine, for a machine.
