One evening, a monitoring alert went off: a server behind a web service was down.

I handed the incident to an AI coding agent. Half experiment, half laziness — "it's routine triage, what could go wrong."

Let me put the conclusion up front, honestly.

The first half was sharper than most junior engineers.

And in the second half, with nobody attacking it, the agent decided it was being hacked — and started fabricating evidence while it lost the plot.