Even in pre-AI world, there were no testers around me for the past many years, and those people who actually tested the final product before the release (their titles were probably something like "release engineer", not "Tester" or "QA") would file a bug if a problem is found, but they were never responsible for the bug I introduced. The commits had my name on them, and people would come to me with questions. If I could not answer the question because I forgot the code, I would sit down and figure out.
Now with AI, at least after a ~year of using AI for development, things haven't changed in terms of responsibility: my commits still have my name on them, and people will come to me with questions. If I cannot answer the question because I forgot the code or never wrote it in the first place, I will sit down and figure out.
As for the reviewer, I never saw anyone being grilled for stamping buggy code. People make mistakes all the time, including when reviewing someone's code. Code reviews are nice to have and catch real issues, but it's naive to think that they could protect from code breakage, regardless if it's post-AI or not.
* if fully automated agentic delivery was pushed by C-levels to save eng cost - they must be responsible
* if code was written with AI assisted tools, then engineer is responsible
* if engineering manager and PMs pushed hard to release the feature with cutting too much scope, then they should be responsible.
BUT we don't live in ideal world, so here is what would happen (timeline):
* incident started, and getting too costly
* CTO, then eventually CEO joins the incident meeting and starts teaching people how to handle incidents
* incident will cost some money (or multiple of them), post mortem will contain non-sense to hide issues, because they can't blame C-level for pushing their shiny automated JIRA ticket closer agent
* CEO announces layoffs, says sorry, takes all the responsibility for this issue, but kicks off 40% of the team
An AI-assisted team. There are many ways to prevent issues from the dev laptop, to team code review, to pre-build test, to automated agentic testing, monitoring, canary deployments with auto-remediation but if all fail teams are the ones to solve.
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[ 6.6 ms ] story [ 37.1 ms ] threadNow with AI, at least after a ~year of using AI for development, things haven't changed in terms of responsibility: my commits still have my name on them, and people will come to me with questions. If I cannot answer the question because I forgot the code or never wrote it in the first place, I will sit down and figure out.
As for the reviewer, I never saw anyone being grilled for stamping buggy code. People make mistakes all the time, including when reviewing someone's code. Code reviews are nice to have and catch real issues, but it's naive to think that they could protect from code breakage, regardless if it's post-AI or not.
* if fully automated agentic delivery was pushed by C-levels to save eng cost - they must be responsible
* if code was written with AI assisted tools, then engineer is responsible
* if engineering manager and PMs pushed hard to release the feature with cutting too much scope, then they should be responsible.
BUT we don't live in ideal world, so here is what would happen (timeline):
* incident started, and getting too costly
* CTO, then eventually CEO joins the incident meeting and starts teaching people how to handle incidents
* incident will cost some money (or multiple of them), post mortem will contain non-sense to hide issues, because they can't blame C-level for pushing their shiny automated JIRA ticket closer agent
* CEO announces layoffs, says sorry, takes all the responsibility for this issue, but kicks off 40% of the team
* We are hiring...