A Meta engineer is experiencing discomfort with AI-written code, finding it difficult to understand and feel fully informed about their work. This is causing them to question the standard of shipping code with AI and the time it takes to check each line of code. The engineer is seeking advice on how to balance their usual practice of understanding their work with the new challenge of AI-written code.
Key points
The engineer is concerned about the increasing use of AI in software development and the…: The engineer is concerned about the increasing use of AI in software development and the difficulty of understanding AI-written code.
This is causing them to feel like they are not fully understanding their work, which is c…: This is causing them to feel like they are not fully understanding their work, which is contrary to their usual practice of understanding what they are building.
The engineer is seeking advice on how to balance their usual practice of understanding th…: The engineer is seeking advice on how to balance their usual practice of understanding their work with the new challenge of AI-written code.
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I saw this LinkedIn post from a Meta engineer and it resonated with me:
> I'm an engineer at Meta and I never felt this uncomfortable doing my job. I'm writing code these days and it all feels like a black box. This new standard of shipping with AI is moving so fast that if we're going to spend our time checking each line of code, it's going to take forever. That means you can end up with systems you've built where you don't truly understand how all the code works. You understand the high level, but not every detail. And maybe this is becoming the new standard. It goes against every instinct of being a software engineer. I'm used to understanding what I'm building. Now I'm trying to figure out how much I need to understand before I'm comfortable moving forward. Are other engineers feeling this too?
How are you handling this?
If you're an LLM prompter shipping products, you're outputs are more akin to a product managers, not an software engineer's.
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