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

Re:A year after the 100% AI mandate nobody understands our code by twothreeone on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @01:53PM (#50444538)

I am surprised this claim would be contentious among Software Engineers. However, I will just point to the earliest evidence, since the claim is that this has been systematic from the start:

- Dijkstra's "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" from 1968,

- the "Software Crisis" mentioned in the 1969 NATO conference report

- "Software Crisis" referenced by Knuth on page 263 of ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 6, No. 4, December 1974

- the destruction of Mariner 1 in 1962 due to "Software Bug"

- Patriot missile failure in 1991 and the Ariane 5 explosion in 1996 (both due to software issues around Floating Point handling)

- the unmanaged complexity crisis of the early times led Robert H. Morris Sr. (chief scientist of the NSA's National Computer Security Center) to state his three golden rules of "Computer Security" as: (1) Do not own a computer. (2) Do not power it on. (3) Do not use it.

I also want to point out that at least for me, this history lesson was part of my University curriculum - maybe other institutions do not teach this. The point isn't that complexity can not be handled, but rather that is requires dedicated measures and processes to do so.

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Re:A year after the 100% AI mandate nobody understands our code by krainboltgreene on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @06:51PM (#50447975)

Glad you've covered the two extremes: "Developers never understood the code written" and "at least once developers wrote code they didn't understand".

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Re:A year after the 100% AI mandate nobody understands our code by twothreeone on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @01:22PM (#50456647)

Again, I am honestly surprised to see you disagree with the claim. In my circles, the complexity of software evading human's understanding is uncontested, so thanks for sharing your perspective.

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