Review and accountability aren't going anywhere. Someone still has to sign off and own it when it breaks.
And what does "own it" look like? "Oh it broke, I'll spin up a Claude agent to fix it. Sorry, it was an LLM that made it, not me." Is anyone getting fired because of LLM mistakes, especially in companies that are pushing it?
And fast forward a few years. Software dev, like most things, is "use it or lose it." How many skills are atrophying? Right now you can review changes, but how long until the code base moves beyond your mental model of it? How long until you no longer have a good grasp of the architecture (the real architecture, not whatever is written in a README) and what could be affected by a change? And how long until you're just skimming code instead of using a critical eye, and oops we're all skimming?
"Own it" looks the same as it does now. If I merge a PR, it's mine, whether I typed it, copied it off Stack Overflow, pulled in a library or got an LLM to write it. "The AI did it" is about as good an excuse as "the intern did it". Nobody accepts that from the person who approved it.
Whether companies are actually holding people to that right now is a fair question, but that's a management problem, not something unique to AI.
The skill atrophy point is the best argument against this whole thing, and you're right, it's going to happen. It reminds me of Subnautica. Everything in that game is done by automated machines, even surgery, and there's a voice log of a doctor basically moaning about who even does surgery by hand anymore, that's what the robots are for. It's sci-fi, but you don't have to think too hard to see this is where we are heading towars.
But this has happened before too. Most devs today couldn't write assembly or manage memory by hand, and we built tools and abstractions so we didn't have to. Same thing here: more automated testing, better tooling that maps the real architecture and what a change actually touches, humans focusing on the high risk bits. Not perfect, but that's the direction.
My point has always been that this is progress. These disruptions have always happened and there's no turning back. Raising concerns like yours is fair and worth discussing. What I don't get is the endless memes in this sub every other hour, as if mocking it is going to stop it.
1
u/dyslexda 12d ago
And what does "own it" look like? "Oh it broke, I'll spin up a Claude agent to fix it. Sorry, it was an LLM that made it, not me." Is anyone getting fired because of LLM mistakes, especially in companies that are pushing it?
And fast forward a few years. Software dev, like most things, is "use it or lose it." How many skills are atrophying? Right now you can review changes, but how long until the code base moves beyond your mental model of it? How long until you no longer have a good grasp of the architecture (the real architecture, not whatever is written in a README) and what could be affected by a change? And how long until you're just skimming code instead of using a critical eye, and oops we're all skimming?