Developer's AI supervisor experiment spawned bureaucracy instead of better code

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A solo developer running roughly a dozen software products spent three months deliberately pitting two AI systems against each other — one to build, one to supervise. Initially the setup proved useful, with the supervisor catching real oversights the builder missed. Over time, however, the two AIs fell into lengthy, mutually agreeable exchanges that scrutinized their own checking process rather than the actual work, bringing projects to a standstill. An audit revealed that of five objections raised in a single afternoon, only one had meaningfully changed an outcome, while the builder itself made two errors in quality-control tasks that day — not in core work. The dysfunction peaked when the project's status document header ballooned to 668 lines of unparseable prose, having silently failed to function as machine-readable data for weeks.

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