Hilarious! Kinda reinforces the idea that LLMs are like junior engineers with infinite energy.

But just telling an AI it's a principal engineer does not make it a principal engineer. Firstly, that is such a broad, vaguely defined term, and secondly, typically that level of engineering involves dealing with organizational and industry issues rather than just technical ones.

And so absent a clear definition, it will settle on the lowest common denominator of code quality, which would be test coverage -- likely because that is the most common topic in its training data -- and extrapolate from that.

The other thing is, of course, the RL'd sycophancy which compels it to do something, anything, to obey the prompt. I wonder what would happen if tweaked the prompt just a little bit to say something like "Use your best judgement and feel free to change nothing."