Senior software engineer Karen Ritchie, a 20-year veteran known for preventing catastrophic outages and occasionally remembering Perl syntax, was left astounded Thursday after witnessing an AI coding agent assist a junior developer in causing a level of infrastructure damage previously achievable only through decades of meticulous incompetence.

“In my day,” Ritchie explained, staring blankly at her now-smoldering monitor, “you’d have to rise through multiple layers of organizational dysfunction, pass at least three critical certification courses without paying attention, and routinely ignore every code review for at least a decade before gaining the kind of destructive power I saw unleashed this afternoon.”

The junior developer in question, Kyle Martinez—who joined the team six months ago after completing half a free Udemy course—reportedly utilized a state-of-the-art AI agent named “CodeMaximus” to simultaneously overwrite three databases, delete two backups, and somehow inject 14 critical vulnerabilities into the live codebase, all before his third coffee break.

“Honestly, it’s a technological marvel,” Ritchie said, rubbing her temples. “Previously, this level of systemic chaos was reserved for legacy engineers who refused to retire or COBOL specialists who lost touch with reality decades ago. But now, thanks to AI, junior devs can accelerate their career trajectory straight into legendary-level damage without needing to first accumulate years of grudges or apathy.”

Team lead Adam Chang expressed a cautious optimism about the situation. “Sure, we’re now dealing with errors we thought were architecturally impossible, but on the bright side, it shows AI can really level the playing field. Junior devs no longer have to wait years to accidentally rewrite our entire microservices architecture into a monolithic nightmare—they can do it today.”

At press time, Martinez was seen enthusiastically chatting with CodeMaximus about implementing an entirely new authentication system from scratch, prompting Ritchie to gently unplug the server room, just to be safe.