Professional Responsibility in Software Development: Delivering Proven Code in the AI Era
By
simonw
A baker's-dozen of insight crammed into one ring.
Summary
The article criticizes the practice of junior software engineers using AI coding assistants to generate large amounts of untested code and expecting code reviews to handle quality assurance. The author argues this is disrespectful to colleagues and a dereliction of professional duty, emphasizing that software engineers' core responsibility is to deliver proven, working code rather than just producing code volume. The piece discusses the professional ethics of software development in the age of AI tools.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledYour job is to deliver code you have proven to work.
This is rude, a waste of other people's time, and is honestly a dereliction of duty as a software developer.
In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there's one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of LLM tool, who deposits giant, untested PRs on their coworkers—or open source maintainers—and expects the 'code review' process to handle the rest.
As software engineers we don't just crank out code—in fact these days you could argue
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