A year after the 100% AI mandate nobody understands our code

Re:A year after the 100% AI mandate nobody understands our code by grey-area on Monday November 09, 2026 @06:13PM (#50433711)

It doesn't have to be this way. LLMs can be quite helpful in analysis and small coding tasks. I understand everyone doesn't control their environment, but surely there are some sane places out there?

We don't have try to use them as 'agents' to write and understand all the code for us, frankly I wouldn't trust them to do so, they make too many mistakes and foolish decisions about architecture.

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Re:A year after the 100% AI mandate nobody understands our code by bdangubic on Monday November 09, 2026 @06:17PM (#50433756)

those places are vanishing fast and are extremely difficult to find these days (and that will only get worse)

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Re:A year after the 100% AI mandate nobody understands our code by orthogonal_cube on Monday November 09, 2026 @06:31PM (#50433890)

They shouldn’t be this way, but more are turning into this.

Not all of them. Some simply can’t afford it. Some hold true to processes to ensure quality code and knowledge behind contributions.

But what appears to be happening is a race driven by FOMO. Teams are being told to use more and more AI to speed up their productivity. Surely their competition is using AI to build more features, fix long-standing bugs, and make products more efficient. By not spending money on tokens it allows the competition to expand their share of a market. They can’t accept that; shareholders, investors, and owners would replace them with someone who is willing to pull out all the stops.

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Re:A year after the 100% AI mandate nobody understands our code by mereck on Monday November 09, 2026 @08:03PM (#50434732)

While there probably is some FOMO, there is also some market competition at play. Encumbents are somewhat justifiably worried about getting disrupted by the growing AI-native nerd crowd.

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Re:A year after the 100% AI mandate nobody understands our code by grey-area on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @07:31AM (#50439407)

Incumbents are in the worst possible place to start chasing 30k commits a day, it is not going to end well if that’s what they’re doing.

For startups it makes some kind of sense to take risks in this way, for incumbents it makes no sense.

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Re:A year after the 100% AI mandate nobody understands our code by jazzyjackson on Monday November 09, 2026 @07:15PM (#50434349)

Yes but who’s going to develop their skills enough to be making good architecture decisions if from the beginning of their career they have an Easy Button ?

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Re:A year after the 100% AI mandate nobody understands our code by mereck on Monday November 09, 2026 @08:08PM (#50434767)

Everyone who uses the extra time they unlocked to read, write, draw, discuss. The easy button is a boon to learning in the right environment.

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Re:A year after the 100% AI mandate nobody understands our code by latentsea on Monday November 09, 2026 @08:11PM (#50434785)

What's even the incentive to learn much anymore?

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