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if you don’t maintain ownership,
What do you mean by this?
I assume you mean if you don't understand the code or maintain the mastery of it. A counter to that is there are many times, most in my case where the code I write will eventually be someone else's job to maintain. And I have lost count of the times I've had to maintain others code.
Another counter to this is on large projects you cannot know all the code. You can't keep it all in your head.
The problem I see with AI written code is making sure it is readable and understandable by a human expert. This is a problem with human devs as well. We have probably all seen projects that worked but the code was incredibly hard to grok.
Basically taking responsibility for the code that you merge, understanding how it works, how it plays with other code it touches, and implications of the change, and being on the hook to fix it later if/when it breaks, assuming you're still around.
A counter to that is there are many times, most in my case where the code I write will eventually be someone else's job to maintain. And I have lost count of the times I've had to maintain others code.
I agree with you here. Most of the time the code you work with was written by someone who is long gone. I guess the same can be said for LLM-generated code. But generally you are in a better spot if the person who wrote it wrote it expecting they would be around, compared to the alternative (as in, the author expected to have to maintain it, not that they could make it complex because only they understand it).
Another counter to this is on large projects you cannot know all the code. You can't keep it all in your head.
I agree with this, too. I've worked on both small and large codebases and there is definitely a point in which you can't know it all.
The problem I see with AI written code is making sure it is readable and understandable by a human expert. This is a problem with human devs as well. We have probably all seen projects that worked but the code was incredibly hard to grok.
That's true, and I agree that humans are also bad at this. It's something that generally more senior engineers get better at - keeping things simple instead of overly complicated, and therefore more maintainable.
I guess what this really means to me is if you don't take ownership of the code you merge, I might as well not have you as a teammate and instead could just employ AI agents to replace you. I want people who think critically and review what their coding assistant provides instead of just using it to pump volume and close issues faster/easier/without working as hard.
I think you left a comment elsewhere about AI revealing lazy people. This is probably the crux of the issue.
This is a problem with human devs as well.
True
Maybe there's a way to maintain ownership without reading the source code.
Anyone that doesn’t read the code they ship is just asking for trouble. AI is a great tool to use but if you don’t maintain ownership, you’re fucked long term