When MIT researchers put EEG caps on people writing essays with ChatGPT, 83% of the AI group could not quote a single sentence from the essay they had just finished. The number stayed abstract to me until I opened my own repo and did not recognize the code on screen.
The forty-second pause
Last Tuesday I opened my project repo to fix a small bug in the scoring code. The bug was nothing, a wrong threshold. I knew which file, opened it, and then I just sat there for maybe forty seconds.
The function was 28 lines. My name was on the commit. The code was fine. I had no idea I had written it.
I scrolled up to look at git blame and there I was, Egor Fedorov, 6 days ago. I scrolled through the rest of the file and the same thing kept happening. I recognized the structure (because I had asked for the structure), but the specific lines were a blank. Like reading a translation of a book I wrote in another language.
