Talks Back

When someone points out a mistake in code review, I usually accept it. I don't have the toughness to insist "no, this is correct" when something clearly isn't.

I used to think it was personality. Lately it feels more like an occupational disease.

I've written code for a quarter century. Code doesn't lie. It throws the writer's own shallowness straight back.

Bugs. Production incidents. Review comments. User complaints. Edge cases hit through paths no one imagined. Implementations where "I thought it worked" isn't an excuse. The feeling of reading code I wrote six months ago and not remembering what I was thinking.

That kind of thing has been thrown back at me every week. Code is a snapshot of the writer's intelligence at the moment it was written. Six months later, it usually looks embarrassing.

Live that way long enough and outside criticism starts landing differently. Defending "I am right" too hard probably doesn't pay. Mistakes come back from the code soon enough. Easier to admit them early.

In the last year, I've had AI write more of my code. I throw it design sketches. I consult it on operational decisions.

People entering the industry now may not accumulate the experience of "code I wrote betraying me" the way my generation did. AI writes the code, AI reviews it, AI ships it, AI handles the first cut at incident response. Mistakes still exist. Getting hit for vague prompts or shallow design calls might even happen more often. But that doesn't feel like your own shallowness coming back at you.

The personality of engineers themselves may start to shift. If you get punched by code less often, more people stay confident. Whether to call that blame-shifting or healthy self-esteem, I can't say. "Because the AI wrote it that way." "Because the AI designed it that way." I've already heard those phrases planted at the front of a discussion more times than I can count.

Still, there's no field in a postmortem report for "because the AI wrote it that way." At least not yet. Even when AI writes the code, the name on the line for operations is still a human's.

That part hasn't changed. How long it stays that way, I don't know.