AI Didn't Break Your Culture. It Exposed It.

An engineer pushes back on a decision. The response: "ChatGPT recommended something else." The tell isn't the recommendation. It's that they reached for an oracle instead of an argument. You're not watching an AI problem. You're watching a culture problem that predates the model by years. I've been the oracle. The Oracle Was Always There Before ChatGPT, it was Stack Overflow. Before Stack Overflow, it was the one senior engineer who had been around longest. Teams find oracles when they don't have frameworks. They fill the decision vacuum with whatever authority is nearest. ChatGPT is just the most accessible oracle ever built. It's confident, available at 2am, and it never makes you feel stupid for asking. Of course engineers reach for it. The question is what they're replacing with it. If your team has no shared framework for architectural decisions, no clear authority structure, no agreed-on method for weighing tradeoffs ... "ChatGPT recommended something else" is just the latest ver