In 2013 I wrote a small list of phrases developers used too often. Twelve years later, the phrases have changed and the wincing has not. Here are ten I hear every week, and what each one usually means.
No company is named here, and nobody in particular is being described. I have said at least four of these out loud myself, which is how I know they are funny.
1. “We are an AI-first company.”
Announced with a straight face by a company whose website search still cannot find its own pricing page.
2. “AI will not replace you. A person using AI will.”
The most repeated sentence of the decade. Nobody has ever produced the study, the data, or even the name of the person who first said it. It is now quoted the way people quote scripture, which is to say confidently and slightly wrong.
3. “It is not about replacing people, it is about freeing them up.”
Freed up to do higher value work. The higher value work has not been named yet. Some of them get freed up so thoroughly that they are freed from the building.
4. “Human in the loop.”
One human. In the loop. At eleven at night. Holding the loop together with both hands while everyone else says the loop is fully automated.
5. “It is not a wrapper.”
It is a wrapper. A good wrapper is a perfectly respectable thing to build, and the denial is the only embarrassing part.
6. “We do not need a DBA, the model tunes it.”
Every database person I know has a version of this story, and it always has the same shape. The confidence lasts about six weeks. Then somebody notices the reports are slower than last quarter, and the person who used to tune the database has been freed up to do higher value work somewhere else, at a competitor, for more money.
7. “It hallucinated.”
It made something up. We invented a gentle, faintly poetic word for a machine being wrong, while the word we use when a person is wrong is still just wrong.
8. “I built an entire startup in a weekend.”
It has a landing page, a waitlist, and a very confident font.
9. “It is like having a junior developer.”
A junior developer who never learns, never sleeps, never asks a question, and deletes production with total confidence. The junior developers I have worked with grew up. This one starts every morning exactly as new as yesterday.
10. “Five years of LLM experience required.”
In a job advertisement. For a technology that is three years old. I would love to meet the candidate, and I suspect so would the people who built it.
One More Thing
None of this means the tools are bad. I use them daily and my work is better for it. It means we are all still reaching for the same twenty words while we figure out what we actually think, which is what people always do when something new arrives and nobody wants to look slow.
In 2013 the list was “I can fix that” and “it works on my machine”. Twelve years later it is agents and guardrails and journeys. The technology moved. The instinct did not.
Your turn. Tell me the one I missed, the phrase that makes you put your coffee down. I will run the best of them in a follow up, and I promise not to describe that as a journey.
This is not a complaint about the words, it is a reminder that the person saying them is usually trying to sound certain about something nobody is certain about yet.
Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com/), AI and Work, X
