Hacker News Reader

Comment by evekayser | Hacker News Reader

I think the same happens now with AI generating code. Nobody will read every line. that's part of the process from now on.

View on HN

The human who commits a bad change still takes the fall though. Automation doesn't absolve accountability.

But people think it does, and it’s annoying. The past months I’ve often found mistakes and then heard the response along the lines of “oh Claude wrote that”.

It’s used as an excuse, and then the conversation just moves on. I don’t see a lot of accountability being taken. If anything, senior leadership sees it as a sign of adoption and accepts a certain level of risk.

What is "taking accountability" supposed to look like in this case?

As an aside, trying to enforce some cultural more without the backing of senior leadership is a waste of time. You should probably follow your colleagues example and get a better return on your time with Claude and stop caring. If you are the only one at your company who cares and you aren't the largest shareholder I have to ask under what economic theory you are operating. Unless you work for a charity or something you should probably either find a new job or stop complaining about the relative luxury of being handed a fistful of money just to be able to say "Claude wrote that".

Apparently no one at your company cares, so why do you?

> What is "taking accountability" supposed to look like in this case?

Admitting that you didn't validate the AI output carefully enough, and committing to do better in future.

> Apparently no one at your company cares, so why do you?

I'm not the other commenter, but this is part of my job. I'm often called in to deal with issues that have been created by bad developers, offshore developers, contractors or consultants who've helicoptered in and out, and now AI.

The basic requirements are the same in all these cases: identify the problem, recommend and/or implement fixes, and recommend process improvements.

Sometimes those improvements involve negative effects for the people perpetuating these issues.

It may not be wise to assume you can abdicate all responsibility for your work if you're somewhere that does, in the end, care about results.

The rate of output from LLMs is very high compared to most developers' capacity to review every line, especially when they are often working on multiple tasks from multiple projects all on the same day. The directive to increase code churning is coming from the top since upper management believes everything tech CEOs advertise to them, and there is increasing anxiety across tech, mathematics, finance, arts, etc. about getting replaced so people want to at least appear to be much more productive with AI. The new norm is fast becoming "There will be mistakes, but maybe not most of the time. We'll deal with it when we get there, and since we're all on the same boat, let's spread out the blame or try to ignore it since you never know when it might happen to you."

To be fair, this was always the case as there was never any guarantee of bug-free code in general, but the difference today is mainly in volume.

And the code they produce is hard to review because it isn't written in the way a human would write it. Overly verbose, overly complex, using lots of theoretically interesting constructs but unnecessary for the problem at hand. It's as if they get paid by the line.

You can to some degree curb these tendencies but I don't doubt that many people just give up at some point.

Yes, they do.

But this problem goes far deeper. People that hire someone else believe they have outsourced the responsibility, and not the work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com