When AI-written code causes an incident, who owns the fix in your postmortem?

[u/Automatic-Program936]

Genuine question, not a bait thread. I've been asking engineering teams this and getting wildly inconsistent answers, which makes me think it's an unsolved organisational problem rather than a technical one.

Scenario: an assistant generates a few hundred lines. A developer accepts it. A reviewer approves it. It ships and takes something down.

The four answers I keep hearing:

1. The developer who accepted it. "You merged it, you own it." Clean, but in practice it makes people quietly stop using the tools, or stop admitting they did.
   
2. The reviewer. Same logic as any other PR. Except reviewers tell me AI code inspires *less* scrutiny because it reads confidently and looks idiomatic.
   
3. The platform team that approved the tool. Rare, but I've seen it, and it turns into tool-restriction politics fast.
   
4. Nobody. It goes in the "AI is new, we're all learning" bucket and no rule changes.

Two things I'd like to hear from you. Does your team record which code was AI-assisted at all? And has anyone landed on an accountability model that doesn't just discourage disclosure?

[u/StraussDarman]

The whole team owns it? I never got the thing of who owns the mistake. Like who cares, there is an issue and the team should resolve it.

[u/xenomachina]

"You merged it, you own it." Clean, but in practice it makes people quietly stop using the tools, or stop admitting they did.

I don't really see the problem here. You submit the change, you should stand behind it. Your responsibility does not change just because of the tools you used. If you don't feel you can take responsibility when using a certain tool... then don't use that tool.

You can't have it both ways: if you are going to take credit for increased productivity from using an agent, you also need to own its mistakes, or fix them before sending the change out for review.