The author of Libre Wedding Planner banned AI contributions to avoid future drama, yet continued using AI at work. He describes how AI coding tools initially felt powerful—reducing task times from days to hours—but quickly spiraled into dependency. He enabled enhanced autocomplete in VSCode, used code generation models, and eventually let AI co-sign commits, which he later disabled to pretend the code was his own.

He began pasting entire Jira ticket descriptions into AI agents, losing control over necessary changes. Others admitted they didn’t understand 20% of the code they pushed to production. He started running multiple AI agents across git worktrees, connected them to Jira via ACLI, and delegated tasks entirely.

When asked for code reviews or explanations, he felt unable to admit he was merely an "AI shepherd." The experience left him questioning his competence and autonomy.