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I don't doubt that. But humans still need to be responsible for understanding what they're shipping. And IMO you get your best understanding by actually writing

I don't doubt that. But humans still need to be responsible for understanding what they're shipping. And IMO you get your best understanding by actually writing some code. Even if you don't actually ship what you wrote.

baridbelmedar 15d ago
Let’s not romanticize it too much... A lot of enterprise systems are built by developers copying an old AbstractBeanFactoryFactory from a 2011 stack overflow thread without really understanding it :)
- pydry 15d ago
  Nobody is. It's the AI slop which is supposed to replace this shit which barely worked with equally shit shit which doesnt work which people are romanticizing. Most of the human written code was slop, but the really fundamental and successful stuff we relied upon and which we didnt want to throw away? yeah, not so much. most of that was actually really good. those EJB monstrosities were routinely swapped out by some saas written in python by somebody who did it properly and werent responsible for a lot of late and over budget projects which barely worked or didnt work.
- clem 15d ago
  And which, in turn, was used to train LLMs without any guidance as to whether it's "good" or "bad" code.
FloorEgg 15d ago
> But humans still need to be responsible for understanding what they're shipping I don't necessarily disagree. That said... Why? I've been grappling with this myself. There is an easy/obvious answer, but I wonder how stable/permanent it is. If you feel strongly about this, are you willing to unpack your judgement?
- softwaredoug 15d ago
  Certainly the population of people that need to know how something works is much smaller. But even still, cognitive debt is a real, documented phenomenon where we lose our ability to change projects.[1] We also know coding agents tend to accumulate slop in projects over time without some human intervention[2] There's also the concern of whether its a good idea to be dependent on an addictive slot machine run by a trillion dollar company to do your work. 1 - https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/cognitive-debt/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/cognitive-debt/ 2 - https://www.scbench.ai/ https://www.scbench.ai/
- jplusequalt 15d ago
  >Why? We are overly reliant on technology today. I don't see this trend slowing down in the future. I think that a world where everyone is reliant on technology, and nobody understands how it works is a nightmare.
JodieBenitez 15d ago
Yeah... like we all get to start green field projects and write all the code we should understand. Many of us cut our teeth on bad legacy stuff with no proper documentation made by "engineers" long gone. At least a LLM can easily make sense of this mess.

baridbelmedar 15d ago

Let’s not romanticize it too much... A lot of enterprise systems are built by developers copying an old AbstractBeanFactoryFactory from a 2011 stack overflow thread without really understanding it :)

pydry 15d ago
Nobody is. It's the AI slop which is supposed to replace this shit which barely worked with equally shit shit which doesnt work which people are romanticizing. Most of the human written code was slop, but the really fundamental and successful stuff we relied upon and which we didnt want to throw away? yeah, not so much. most of that was actually really good. those EJB monstrosities were routinely swapped out by some saas written in python by somebody who did it properly and werent responsible for a lot of late and over budget projects which barely worked or didnt work.
clem 15d ago
And which, in turn, was used to train LLMs without any guidance as to whether it's "good" or "bad" code.

FloorEgg 15d ago

> But humans still need to be responsible for understanding what they're shipping I don't necessarily disagree. That said... Why? I've been grappling with this myself. There is an easy/obvious answer, but I wonder how stable/permanent it is. If you feel strongly about this, are you willing to unpack your judgement?

softwaredoug 15d ago
Certainly the population of people that need to know how something works is much smaller. But even still, cognitive debt is a real, documented phenomenon where we lose our ability to change projects.[1] We also know coding agents tend to accumulate slop in projects over time without some human intervention[2] There's also the concern of whether its a good idea to be dependent on an addictive slot machine run by a trillion dollar company to do your work. 1 - https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/cognitive-debt/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/cognitive-debt/ 2 - https://www.scbench.ai/ https://www.scbench.ai/
jplusequalt 15d ago
>Why? We are overly reliant on technology today. I don't see this trend slowing down in the future. I think that a world where everyone is reliant on technology, and nobody understands how it works is a nightmare.

JodieBenitez 15d ago

Yeah... like we all get to start green field projects and write all the code we should understand. Many of us cut our teeth on bad legacy stuff with no proper documentation made by "engineers" long gone. At least a LLM can easily make sense of this mess.