Support Group Forms for Software Engineers Unable to Write Code Without First Consulting AI

SAN FRANCISCO — A support group for software engineers unable to write code without first consulting an AI model has quietly formed in the Mission District, meeting weekly in a Unitarian fellowship hall to share strategies for completing tasks without deferring to a language model's preferred implementation.

"I told myself I'd only use it for boilerplate," said a backend engineer who asked to be identified as M., holding a paper coffee cup at the group's Thursday meeting. "Now I can't type a variable name without needing to know what it would have called it."

The group, Developers Autonomous, has attracted 23 members since its founding in March. Its twelve-step program lists "accepting that your last three code reviews reflected the model's opinions" as Step Four and "reading documentation without asking the model to summarize it first" as Step Eight.

Meetings do not permit laptops. Three members have relapsed on the walk home.

The group was founded after a published report documented that AI coding tools produce the same variable-reward compulsion loops as social media — a finding one founding member described as "accurate and not at all surprising to anyone who has refreshed the autocomplete suggestion seventeen times hoping it would be different."

The group publishes a weekly newsletter. Its founding statement, the twelve steps, and six of the seven meeting agendas were generated by GPT-4o. No member has read them in full.

"We are not anti-AI," the founding statement reads. "We simply believe that a human should occasionally decide what a function is called."

"The thing is," said the group's founder, a principal engineer at a Series B startup, "it's usually right."