It’ll do things like write a great helper function that it uses once but never again, maybe even writing a second copy of it the next time it would use it.

Holy shit! That exactly explains why I’ve seen so many duplicated functions lately. I brought it up to the dev responsible the first time I found one (git blame), and he was just like “oh haha I can remove one” like he wasn’t quite sure what I was talking about, now I realize he must’ve gotten on that AI train much earlier than I thought…

building a business solely on manipulation

See also: all of advertising and marketing