"ChatGPT Has Fulminated My Skills as an Engineer." Real People. Real Damage. Real Stories.

The Quiet Collapse Nobody Talks About

There is a conversation happening right now across Reddit, Medium, the DEV Community, and OpenAI's own forums that OpenAI would prefer you never see. It is not about outages or hallucinations or billing disputes. It is about something far more personal: people losing the very abilities that defined their careers.

Software engineers who can no longer solve problems without AI. Professors watching their students forget how to think. Workers who nearly lost their jobs because they trusted a single ChatGPT answer they never bothered to verify. These are not hypothetical scenarios. These are real people writing real accounts of real damage, and we have collected the most striking of them here.

What follows is not a hit piece. It is a mirror. Every quote below comes from someone who chose to share their experience publicly, and each one describes a pattern that OpenAI's marketing materials will never acknowledge: the slow, invisible erosion of human capability that happens when you let a machine do your thinking for you.

The Engineer Who Became a Debugger

This is perhaps the most haunting account in the collection. A senior software engineer, someone with years of experience building systems from scratch, described what happened after integrating ChatGPT deeply into their daily workflow.

Think about the weight of that word: fulminated. Not "slightly degraded." Not "somewhat affected." Fulminated. Destroyed violently, like a chemical explosion. This is a person who built things for a living, and who now describes themselves in terms that sound closer to demolition.

The same engineer went further, describing what their day-to-day work had actually become.

This is the transformation nobody warned engineers about. ChatGPT was supposed to make developers faster. Instead, it turned at least some of them into quality assurance testers for a system that confidently produces broken code. Instead of writing solutions, they are now cleaning up after an AI that does not understand what it writes. The creative, architectural, problem-solving work that made engineering fulfilling has been replaced by an endless loop of "prompt, review, fix, repeat."

The DEV Community article that captured this account was titled plainly: "ChatGPT destroyed me as a software engineer." Not "changed." Not "challenged." Destroyed.

Months of Work, Gone in Seconds

While skill erosion is a slow-burn catastrophe, some ChatGPT failures are instant and total. One user described a scenario that anyone who has poured months into a project will feel in their chest.

PearlDarling's posts became a rallying cry on the OpenAI Community Forum. With 28 likes on the original post and follow-ups earning 16, 11, and 9 likes respectively, the thread documented a catastrophic backend failure on February 5, 2025 that wiped out months of accumulated work for paying users. PearlDarling opened three support tickets that went unanswered for over a month, eventually demanding refunds for two months of paid subscription. The response from OpenAI? Silence.

This is the reality that lives beneath the productivity promises. ChatGPT can generate output at extraordinary speed. But when a backend update destroys months of accumulated context and work product, the destruction is proportional to the trust users placed in the platform. Fast in, fast out, and everything you built goes with it.

One Wrong Answer Away from Unemployment

Perhaps the most terrifying category of ChatGPT damage is the professional near-miss. The people who came within inches of losing their livelihoods because they trusted a single AI-generated answer that turned out to be confidently, catastrophically wrong.

sebastos.anthony posted this in a thread titled "Was anyone else's experience with GPT4o completely ruined after recent Update?" on the OpenAI Community Forum. With 13 likes, the post stood out because it described real professional consequences: not annoyance with a chatbot, but actual career damage from a tool that was supposed to help. In the same thread, dtsho (19 likes) reported cancelling their subscription because ChatGPT "spams emojis, types like a teenager." RaffaHeat23 (6 likes) said all custom GPTs were "bugged" with "short, lifeless" responses. The thread became a catalogue of paying customers watching their professional tools disintegrate overnight.

This is the core danger that no amount of fine-tuning can fix. When a professional depends on a tool for daily work, and that tool degrades silently with a backend update, the consequences cascade. The model does not warn you that it has gotten worse. It does not flag that an update has changed its behavior. It just starts producing inferior output with the same confident tone, and the professionals who depend on it pay the price.

A Professor Watches It All Fall Apart

The damage is not limited to the tech industry. In academia, where the entire purpose of the institution is to teach people how to think, ChatGPT has introduced a crisis that one professor described in terms usually reserved for personal tragedies.

Reddit user u/xfnk24001's post was amplified across Threads (@chatgptricks) and Instagram, reaching hundreds of thousands of viewers who recognized the same pattern in their own classrooms and workplaces. Two years. This professor did not rush to judgment. They spent two full years trying to integrate AI into their teaching, watching what it actually did to the learning process, and arrived at a conclusion that could not be clearer: it ruined things.

The detail about fake quotes in ancient texts is particularly telling. ChatGPT does not just get modern facts wrong. It fabricates historical sources with the same serene confidence. It will invent a passage from Aristotle that Aristotle never wrote, format it beautifully, and present it as settled scholarship. For a professor whose life's work depends on the integrity of sources, discovering that their students are submitting AI-fabricated citations from texts that do not contain those words must feel like watching the foundation of their entire discipline crack.

And then there is the other half of the problem: "students skipping the thinking part entirely." The classroom is supposed to be a place where people struggle with difficult ideas, fail, try again, and eventually develop the cognitive muscles that will serve them for decades. ChatGPT short-circuits all of it. Why struggle with an argument when the machine will write one for you? Why develop a thesis through hours of reading when you can have a polished paragraph in eight seconds? The grades look fine. The transcripts look fine. But the minds behind them are hollowing out.

The Broader Pattern: Platforms Full of Pain

These testimonials are not isolated. They are part of a much larger wave of public disillusionment that is spreading across every major platform where people discuss technology.

On Medium, writers have published pieces with titles like "How ChatGPT Ruined My Creativity in Just 2 Months" and "Why I Stopped Trusting ChatGPT After It Nearly Got Me Fired." These are not clickbait headlines from anonymous accounts. They are first-person narratives from professionals who took the time to document exactly how things went wrong.

On ResetEra, a popular internet discussion forum, an entire thread is dedicated to the observation that "ChatGPT has genuinely ruined the internet," cataloging the ways AI-generated content has degraded search results, forum discussions, and the general quality of information online.

On OpenAI's own community forums, users have posted threads about "Catastrophic Failures of ChatGPT that's creating major problems for users" and "Was anyone else's experience with GPT4o completely ruined after recent Update?" These are not outsiders lobbing criticism. These are paying customers like PearlDarling (28 likes), alie1 ("I am a Pro user, paying 200.00 a month for a system that is nothing but one failure after another"), and KennaBrielle ("I absolutely ADORED my characters and now they're just pathetic"), posting on OpenAI's own platform, describing how the product they are paying for is actively making their lives worse.

And then there are the review aggregators. ChatGPT holds a 1.9 out of 5 rating on Trustpilot across 1,111 reviews. OpenAI as a company sits at 1.6 out of 5 from 431 reviews. For context, that is the kind of rating typically associated with predatory lending companies and cable television monopolies. These are not the numbers of a product that is working as advertised.

What These Stories Have in Common

Read through these accounts and a clear pattern emerges. It is not random misfortune. It is not user error. It is a predictable, repeatable cycle that goes like this:

First, the tool works well enough to build trust. ChatGPT generates something that looks competent, and the user integrates it into their workflow. Second, the user gradually offloads more cognitive work to the tool. Why struggle when the machine can do it? Third, the user's own skills begin to atrophy from disuse, but they do not notice because the output still looks good. Fourth, ChatGPT produces something confidently wrong at a critical moment. The user, whose ability to catch errors has degraded, does not catch it in time. Fifth, consequences. A production meltdown. A lost project. A classroom full of students who cannot think. A career nearly destroyed.

This cycle is not a bug. It is an inherent feature of a tool that optimizes for the appearance of competence rather than the development of it. And the people in these testimonials are the ones brave enough to say so publicly. For every engineer who writes about their skills being fulminated, there are likely hundreds more who feel it but stay silent, afraid that admitting AI dependence will make them look weak in a job market that increasingly demands AI fluency.

The Question OpenAI Will Not Answer

OpenAI's response to stories like these has been, broadly, silence. The company publishes research papers about model capabilities, announces new features, and celebrates usage milestones. It does not publish studies on skill degradation among its users. It does not track how many careers have been damaged by confidently wrong answers. It does not measure the cognitive decline that comes from letting a machine do your thinking.

The question they will not answer is simple: if ChatGPT is making some percentage of its users measurably worse at their jobs, does the company have a responsibility to say so?

Every pharmaceutical company is required to list side effects. Every financial product must disclose risks. But the most widely used AI tool in history, a tool that is actively reshaping how millions of people work and think, carries no warning label about the documented pattern of skill erosion, professional risk, and cognitive dependence that its own users are reporting in public forums every single day.

These testimonials exist. These people are real. Their damage is real. And until OpenAI acknowledges the pattern, this page will continue to document what the company will not.