What’s the Worst Advice AI Has Given You? Here’s Mine.

I recently saw a meme about terrible legacy code on platform X and it gave me an idea for a discussion topic. A year ago, the classic developer question was: > “What’s the worst code you’ve ever seen?” But our day-to-day work has changed. Maybe the real question now is: > “What is the worst suggestion AI has ever given you?” I’ll start. I’ve happily survived plenty of questionable code: from “fast hotfixes” that didn’t even touch the root cause, to refactorings that added more complexity than my 15-years-younger self on OOP steroids. But this happened about a year ago and it still sticks in my mind: ## API key in a public Docker image I was working on a GitHub Action that builds a Docker image from my .NET REST API, pushes it to Docker Hub as a public image and then deploys it to Azure. Pretty straightforward, right? There was one small catch: the API uses a private API key to communicate with a third-party service. So I asked ChatGPT for advice. Its suggestion: > “You can store this API key as an environment variable in your Docker image.” Wait… what? Put a private API key inside a public Docker image? *To be clear, environment variables themselves are fine. The problem was baking the secret into the image during build time, which would expose it to anyone pulling or inspecting the public image.* I explained this to ChatGPT. It responded with the classic: > “You are right!” …and suggested storing it securely in Azure. End of the story? Of course not. Just a few messages later, in the same context window, ChatGPT again suggested putting the private API key into the public Docker image as an environment variable. That was the moment I realized: AI isn’t production-ready yet, at least for security advice. 😄 --- ## The interesting shift We used to review junior developers’ code carefully. Now we also need to review code written by something that sounds like a senior engineer but occasionally behaves like an intern on their first day. --- ## Discussion - What’s the most ridiculous suggestion AI or ChatGPT has ever given you? - Do you review AI-generated code differently than human-written code? I’d love to hear real examples from the community.