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What’s the Worst Advice AI Has Given You? Here’s Mine.

Daniel Balcarek on March 04, 2026

I recently saw a meme about terrible legacy code on platform X and it gave me an idea for a discussion topic. A year ago, the classic developer qu...
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Gábor Mészáros

"Now I have the full picture"

not advice but the most misleading line.

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Ingo Steinke, web developer

"Why this works" adding overconfident statements about untested code recommendations.

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Sylwia Laskowska

Maybe that context window just didn’t like you? xDDD
Worst advice for me? Maybe "Just communicate your feelings openly and everything will work out." 🤣🤣🤣

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Daniel Balcarek

Yeah, that’s what I get for asking ChatGPT stupid questions. 😅

Sounds like the plot of a low-budget romantic movie. 🤣🤣

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Ben Halpern

AI is often consoling me about how frustrating my problem is, even simple stuff I just want an answer for. Not sure that counts but I don’t like it

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Daniel Balcarek

Of course it does 😄. For simple questions, I just want a direct answer, not the emotional support intro.

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Anna Villarreal

AI recently told me I could build an ollama image generator for the web. Since I didnt have an M chip, my worthy nvidia graphics card was useless. Useless I say! - shakes old lady stick - 😂

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Daniel Balcarek

Well, I guess you’ll have to sell your ancient Nvidia card and get an M chip. Good advice is priceless 😂😂

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Anna Villarreal

Your absolutely right!

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Ingo Steinke, web developer • Edited

I don't remember the worst, but one of the most frustrating and stubborn one was Perplexity insisting on misattributed facts and claiming my phone wouldn't support eSIM, gaslighted for half an hour feeling like the astronauts arguing with HAL in Kubrick's 2001 movie.

I seriously distrust AI-generated code and look at it more suspiciously than I ever did in human code reviews. I guess I keep scanning for an unconscious gut feeling list of telltale signs of AI hallucination, uncommon patterns or illusion of completeness. AI is often 90% correct, but missing out on the crucial 10%.

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Daniel Balcarek

“Astronauts arguing with HAL” is painfully accurate 😄

Yep, totally agree. I’ve also started becoming more suspicious when implementing something I’m not fully comfortable with. If AI suggests something new that I haven’t seen before, I’ve started asking it to explain the reasoning and then verifying it by checking documentation or searching online/Stack Overflow to confirm it’s actually correct.

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Ingo Steinke, web developer

Illustration of astronauts arguing with HAL

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Web Developer Hyper

Recently, I was setting up a new PC with the help of AI, but I couldn’t finish a specific setting. I spent a lot of time trying to configure it, but in the end, I realized there was no need to set it up at all. I might still be trying if I hadn’t googled and checked it myself. 😅

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Daniel Balcarek

This happens to me every time, even without AI. 😅🤣🤣

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Web Developer Hyper

Haha! That’s funny! 🤣

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Jonathan Tavares

it sometimes confidently patches stuff inside my node_modules, certain it's going to fix that flaky test.

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Daniel Balcarek

lol 😆 nice one

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Tea

Downgrading my esp32 sdk over Arduino IDE to fix encryption lib related bugs, whereas these just result from Arduino IDE getting confused. Resulted in bricking OTA, and a lot of mess.
Bit niche but what can I say. Since then I only use Gepetto for translation when talking with online sellers.
As to why I still use Arduino IDE? Reasons

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Daniel Balcarek

That sounds messy 😅

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Yanko Alexandrov

Mine was letting an AI agent autonomously manage DNS records. It decided to 'optimize' by removing what it thought were redundant A records. Took down three websites for 2 hours before we noticed 😅 Lesson learned: AI automation needs guardrails, especially for infrastructure. Now we have a mandatory human-approval step for anything that touches DNS or production configs.

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Daniel Balcarek

That’s a great lesson learned the hard way 😅

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Aakash

"My smoke tests pass. Now I am sure the latest patch should address the bug we were seeing."

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Daniel Balcarek

That’s confident. I’d definitely trust it. 😅

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Johny Broke

nice