"AI Smells" in 2026 Software Engineering

Just like how there used to be "Code Smells", there are some remarkably obvious "AI Smells" on code and interactions that feel less than savoury...

* 1) Comment blocks in code that are way more verbose than even most non-lazy humans would produce.  There's nothing quite "wrong" with it - and indeed, in some ways, some of the things it does are quite helpful even for whoever next has to try to unpick how it works - but it also just doesn't feel right...

* 2) Obvious markers and tells - like em-dashes and unicode arrows... (yeah, humans don't do those as they all require looking up the symbols as they're not on most keyboard layouts!)

* 3) Screeds of accompanying  documentation, more verbose than even the most prolific documenters out there (aka *me*!!!) would bother to produce, which also have a nasty habit of burying the lede / not making the key points very obvious to pick out

* 4) Code review comment responses that make you wonder if you should just start being less civil + helpful in your comments, and just more blunt / symbolic (i.e. to "maximise efficiency for the machines"), since it doesn't seem like there's gonna be a human on the other end actually reading those anymore...  

(Hmm... this last part I gotta say does sometimes make you feel a bit empty inside. 

Also, there was a time when I did comment on open source project that seemed to be going on the right track in many ways but had some annoying bugs, only for it to then transpire a few days later that the author admitted the whole thing was "an experiment in getting AI to fully do all the work"... Yeah, I think I swiftly stopped caring about that one right then and there...)

Meh...  😥️