LGTM (Looks Good to Me) is a song about AI and the way it's been used, or maybe how a lot of people think it's been used in organizations. I find it catchy, creative, and most importantly, funny. I chuckled out loud.
As a side note, this is one of the amazing things I see with technology these days. There are many incredibly creative people who do amazing things. Even the music/reels/etc. that I don't like can showcase amazing talent. I love it and hope more people can succeed at using their creativity to make a living.
The story in the song is that the boss heard AI was used by one person to do something amazing, so we should be doing that in our company. Does that sound familiar? Any of you out there being wow'd by stories told by management of some other company using AI to do more work than your entire team? I've heard a few of those stories from people, though not at Redgate. We know AI can help us, and we have a lot of usage in engineering, but our view is that AI assists and helps developers. It doesn't replace them.
The song, and a few friends, note that AI is supposed to compress roadmaps and timelines. I do think you might get more code written, perhaps get things done that no one has time to do, but I'm skeptical that true production-level, high-quality systems are being built at 100x engineer speed. Some people might get more code written, and some people are amazing at directing AI.
AI models also go off the rails, and there are certainly some "steps backward" taken when models hallucinate or implement features that don't exist. I've personally seen models tell me features could be used that don't exist in SQL Server. Or that I could load a library in Python that hasn't been written. One part of the song that made me laugh (and want to cry) dealt with this, noting the model made up a library that doesn't exist and a hacker wrote it and slipped it in.
I bet that's happened.
I wouldn't be surprised if hackers were asking LLMs to write code for something in Node/JS (or something) and, when they see a hallucinated library, writing one, and publishing it. What a great thriller/hacker movie idea that might be happening now. I'm sure we'll see plenty of libraries appearing in package managers that people use, not knowing they're full of vulnerabilities, specifically planted inside.
It's a fun song. Some of the things in the song are real. I know people have given AI Agents admin privileges. I know boards and some execs love the idea of firing people and replacing them with AI tokens. I'm sure there's plenty of tests mocked (or changed) by AI agents to create the appearance of code that's well validated. I'm also sure that there's plenty of AI code that no one knows how it works. For sure, bots have deleted databases.
To be fair, a lot of the failures of AI are things humans do. Dropping databases? Not creating tests or mocking them and never adding code? Fixing a bug and making it come back? People do that. AI does it faster.
AI is a tool. It doesn't think, no matter how amazing it can seem. Learn to use the tool well.
Or just shake your head and enjoy the video.
