[nnf]

One thing that worries me about AI-generated code is that if there's an obscure bug that pops up later, there's no engineer to think "ok hang on, I remember something strange happening when I first wrote that code... let me have a look." Instead, there are only engineers who reviewed the code, which is of course a lot different from writing it.

[csdreamer7]

> One thing that worries me about AI-generated code is that if there's an obscure bug that pops up later, there's no engineer to think "ok hang on, I remember something strange happening when I first wrote that code... let me have a look." Instead, there are only engineers who reviewed the code, which is of course a lot different from writing it.

I feel this is a very weak argument against AI. Professional software development rarely values crafting good code. You get it in to meet a deadline to make management that is technologically clueless happy. Even orgs that value good code have people leave because of the take a new job merry-go-round to get a good pay raise of years past. One of the reasons open source surpasses most closed source software despite a lack of funding is you a variety of individuals with different goals that are focused on making a maintainable and usable solution.

[sshine]

> Professional software development rarely values crafting good code. You get it in to meet a deadline to make management that is technologically clueless happy.

While this is very common, you also have professional software developers with a deep sense of ownership about a system: they animated it, so when it’s being quirky in particular ways, you have an almost supernatural sense of what branches it’s following. You don’t really get to internalise the logic of a program by reading it. It’s a byproduct of having to come up with it. When a part of that thinking is outsourced, some logic internalisation is lost.

[shepherdjerred]

Engineers in tech move between jobs/teams often enough that this benefit doesn’t exist anyway

[jerlam]

How common is this situation? While it's nice to look at the history of some line of code and contact the person who wrote it, in a company with a lot of turnover or promotion, that person isn't going to be available or want to help you.

[nunez]

It's pretty handy if they _are_ there, and/or if they've trained others on the codebase.