I asked AI to modify mission-critical code, and what happened next haunts me

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• AI repeated major sections in a mission-critical coding plan.
• Mission-critical coding work is too risky to delegate to AI.
• AI is fine for new features, not core infrastructure.

I woke up in a cold sweat. In my nightmare, I was being chased by tens of thousands of people, all of whom were enraged because I destroyed their privacy. They were all holding laptops over their heads, swinging them like clubs intended for my head.

They say nightmares reflect whatever your subconscious is trying to tell you. Given the work I was planning to start in the morning, I knew exactly what my dark night brain was trying to say.

Also: I retested GPT-5's coding skills using OpenAI's guidance - and now I trust it even less

It was saying, "Stop ...