{"slug": "every-developer-is-lying-about-something-and-ai-wont-fix-it", "title": "Every Developer Is Lying About Something — And AI Won’t Fix It", "summary": "All developers, regardless of experience, engage in some form of deception—whether hiding confusion, overestimating their abilities, or pretending to have more capacity than they do. It contends that AI and coding agents cannot solve these fundamental human problems, as they fail to address issues like asking the wrong questions or the fear of appearing incompetent. The author illustrates this with examples of a brilliant engineer who feels lost on new projects and less experienced developers who avoid asking for help until it is too late.", "body_md": "Yes, all of us are lying. And you are probably lying too. Let me prove it 😉\nOh, I have so many article topics in my head right now. The really exciting kind. But this week absolutely steamrolled me 😅 I finally finished preparing my JSNation talk, and at the same time two other amazing opportunities appeared — one professional, and one that feels more like a childhood dream coming true ☺️ But I don’t want to jinx it yet.\nAnd just so it doesn’t sound like everything magically works out for me — I’ve also had a few CFPs rejected recently. The ones I actually cared about! But honestly? That’s just part of the game. One conference may reject your talk this year and happily accept another one from you the next.\nSo yes, the really big topics will have to wait a little bit longer 🙂 Which doesn’t mean this one is trivial.\nWe talk about AI everywhere now, as if it’s going to solve all our problems. But as we’ve already noticed, there’s no AI without humans, and behind every “smart” model there’s still some human being — at least for now 😉\nWhich is probably why, in practice, coding agents do speed things up… but not nearly as much as many people expected. Some studies even suggest they slow developers down.\nBecause the real problem is often not the code itself. The real problem is the people writing or generating that code.\nAnd unfortunately, all of us lie in one way or another. Sometimes to others. Sometimes to ourselves.\nOne of the best developers I know once confessed something to me.\nThis guy is genuinely brilliant. The kind of engineer companies fight over. He currently works on optimizing drivers for LLMs, gets promoted constantly, and even in this lovely “tech crisis” era, he still had multiple job offers to choose from when he considered switching jobs.\nAnd yet, every single time he joins a new project, he feels like a complete idiot.\nEverybody else seems productive. People are delivering tickets. Writing code. Moving confidently through the project. Meanwhile, he sits there staring at the codebase wondering:\nWhat exactly is happening here?\nWhat are we even building?\nWhy does this work like this?\nWhy are we implementing it this way and not differently?\nAnd then he starts asking questions.\nUsually, it turns out nobody really knows what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, or whether they’re even solving the right problem in the first place.\nIt reminds me of that old joke about lumberjacks cutting down a forest. Eventually, the team leader climbs the tallest tree, looks around, and screams:\n“Guys! We’re cutting down the wrong forest!”\nAnd the workers below shout back:\n“Who cares? We’re making great progress!”\nAnd honestly, no LLM will save us here. Especially if we never even ask the right questions.\nThis is basically an extension of the previous problem.\nA less experienced developer picks up a task and confidently says:\n“Yeah, I know how to do this.”\nUnfortunately, what they often mean is:\n“I hope I’ll somehow figure it out.” 😅\nIn reality, they may not know how to solve the problem, which tools to use, what architecture makes sense... or even what prompt to write to get useful help from a coding agent.\nBut they’re afraid to ask.\nBecause how will they look in front of the team? What will the manager think? The tech lead?\nBest-case scenario: they eventually ask questions… just way too late.\nWorst-case scenario: they never ask at all and deliver something completely wrong. Which often isn’t even caught properly because…\nNow we’re entering senior and leadership territory 😅\nThe motivations differ. Some people build their self-worth around being “the reliable one.” Others are terrified of losing status, influence, or even their job.\nSo they keep taking on more:\nAnd let’s be honest. Something eventually has to break.\nHuman beings are not made of steel. Nobody can operate at 100% forever.\nSo what happens?\nPeople start half-listening during calls. Code reviews become rushed. Documentation quietly dies in a corner somewhere.\nBut they still refuse to admit — either to others or to themselves — that they’re simply overloaded.\nI see this constantly with more advanced juniors and mids.\nThey throw around hilariously optimistic estimates with absolute confidence.\nAnd sure — if they could work uninterrupted for eight straight hours, the application contained no legacy code, edge cases didn’t exist, and other humans never interacted with the system… then maybe the estimate would actually be correct 😄\nThen sprint review arrives, and suddenly everybody is shocked that the team didn’t deliver everything.\nBut this is not the only problem with estimations.\nI once worked with an especially funny senior developer.\nHe treated estimations like sacred truth. He would aggressively defend his numbers during planning sessions, insisting that this specific task was definitely extremely complicated. The rest of the team usually suspected it wasn’t that bad, but eventually we’d surrender just to end the discussion.\nAnd then — at least three separate times — he personally picked up the exact task he had massively overestimated… and finished it in about an hour.\nWhich basically meant the estimation discussion itself took longer than implementing the feature 😅\nDid this experience change his behavior?\nAbsolutely not.\nThese are probably the most dangerous ones.\nI avoid people who say things like:\n“Use THIS technology and ONLY this technology because everything else is garbage.”\nInsert your favorite holy war here:\nAngular vs React, Java vs Python, Rust vs literally anything else 😄\nI never write like that myself. Even when I publish something titled “I Love Tailwind. Sorry Not Sorry”, I still talk about its downsides and explain where it absolutely doesn’t make sense.\nIf one day I start claiming some technology is objectively perfect for every possible situation, please leave a comment saying:\n“Sylwia, go touch grass immediately.” 😅\nHonestly, I’ve always wondered where this sense of absolute certainty comes from.\nBecause not all of these people are even paid influencers. Some genuinely seem emotionally attached to technological holy wars. Others maybe only know one stack deeply, so everything else automatically feels “bad.”\nAnd while this behavior is very common among tech influencers, you absolutely see it inside companies too.\nThe problem is that this kind of certainty can seriously damage projects. People stop questioning decisions. Other developers become afraid to speak up. Stakeholders assume “the confident person” must be right simply because they sound convinced.\nBest-case scenario: you end up with an annoying developer who knows more about frameworks than the actual business domain.\nWorst-case scenario: you end up with a terrible stack choice and spaghetti architecture held together by ego.\nOf course, I’m not innocent either.\nI’ve used many of these lies myself in the past. Maybe I’m older now. Maybe slightly wiser. Or maybe I just recognize these patterns more easily.\nBut I’m definitely still lying somewhere too. Maybe not to others — maybe to myself.\nBecause a lot of our problems in software development aren’t really technical problems at all. They’re deeply human problems:\nAnd honestly, I don’t have some magical solution for this. We’re not going to require three years of therapy from every developer before allowing them into a sprint planning meeting 😄\nBut I have noticed one thing.\nVery often, admitting you don’t know something, openly discussing uncertainty during planning, or simply saying:\n“Sorry, I still don’t understand this. Could you explain it one more time?”\ndoesn’t make people see you as a worse developer.\nQuite often, the opposite happens.\nSuddenly communication inside the team improves. Other people start asking questions too. Conversations become more honest. Problems get discovered earlier.\nSeriously. Try it at least once. You might be surprised 🙂\nSo… what kinds of developer lies do you see most often in your team?", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/every-developer-is-lying-about-something-and-ai-wont-fix-it", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/sylwia-lask/every-developer-is-lying-about-something-and-ai-wont-fix-it-4im0", "published_at": "2026-05-21 07:06:41+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-21 07:34:51.399322+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["JSNation"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/every-developer-is-lying-about-something-and-ai-wont-fix-it", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/every-developer-is-lying-about-something-and-ai-wont-fix-it.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/every-developer-is-lying-about-something-and-ai-wont-fix-it.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/every-developer-is-lying-about-something-and-ai-wont-fix-it.jsonld"}}