Just had the craziest AI experience at work

It totally pissed me off at first, but in retrospect it's fascinating. I'm sure the people reading this have experienced this (or simply understand it) but it was a first for me. This was my first real interaction with AI in the context of shoddy code generation.<br><br>I'm a software engineer at a relatively small company. I was working on a feature with several other people when one of them had a question about how to handle something (this is an iOS app). Something that I do almost every day. I pointed them to the code that handles it, gave them a code snippet and instructions on how to implement it based on the instructions that I had given them. The next day the code was in production and would occasionally crash on all the users. It appeared that the code had been modified to make it simply use an entirely different approach. An approach that I'm familiar with but when I tried to implement it about a year ago the app crashed constantly too. So I was confused how he was able to make it work.<br><br>I saw him in the hallway at work and asked him what the hell he had done. He told me that at Midnight when he was working on it, he asked ChatGPT how to do it and it said to use that approach. It even included a code snippet!!! He told me that he was also aware of the approach but wasn't sure how to implement it. So he copied and pasted the code snippet directly into the app. He told me he was amazed when it worked and he was able to move on to something else. Again, I was irked but was willing to accept that the code worked.<br><br>Fast forward 2 weeks when I received a bug report that the app was crashing for some users and was unusable. I was confused because I haven't touched the code. So I took a look and there was the code snippet that ChatGPT had provided. I don't know if that code had been modified or not. I only know that it was at a point in the app that would crash it and would occasionally crash it for some users. It was around 2 PM and the support team was getting calls about it. I was able to quickly go through and replace the code snippet with my original code snippet and then send the build to the AppStore and it all worked fine.<br><br>This is the first time I had a code snippet from an AI directly cause a problem for me at work. I'm glad that I was able to deduce the problem cause quickly and solve it quickly too. But I was a bit worried for a second that the problem was going to be much more difficult and I'd be working late into the night. Does anyone experience this? Or am I just dumb and didn't know how to use AI correctly? Any thoughts or similar experiences, please let me know!<br><br>&#x200B;