Where I used to work we had hundreds of microservices. Forget looking at the code, I couldn't even tell if the service was live in production or not sometimes, and if so, was it still doing its job?

The react app was almost unworkable, with people just cloning components and dropping them in as another tab with 95% shared code but obtuse names.

I don't think we've even seen the worst of how bad toxic AI code can get :/

This stuff happened before AI. I wonder how they're doing with AI. Probably better, honestly.

I worry that we as a species may end up cargo-culting ourselves into a pattern of fake work that produces real value without understanding the underlying mechanisms. But, it doesn't have any points in this sprint, so I'm going to spike a backlog and bring it up in the retro.

For the overwhelming majority of people, doing is necessary for understanding. If you read a math or physics textbook, you might think you understand it but you won't until you do some questions. Even a history book is deceptive. Much of it will be in one ear and out the other unless you take notes, summarize, ask yourself questions, place things in a mental framework, etc..

When you rely on AI to explain code to you and then make changes to the code, the AI does most of the doing.

Amen to that, AI sometimes doesn't even choose the right answer even when a probe of its internal state shows that it has it. It won't explain itself correctly either. We need to burn our hand in order to learn, and for there's no instruction manual for something so emergent.

> many people don't understand the majority of the code at their company anyways

Many people don't but at least until last year somebody did.