Developers Grapple With Ownership of AI-Generated Code
As coding agents handle more software development, engineers debate whether reading and understanding generated code remains essential.
What to know
- Developers remain legally and operationally responsible for AI-generated code even when they didn't write it themselves.
- Human understanding of code is becoming a bottleneck as AI speeds up development, forcing a rethinking of traditional code-review practices.
- Emerging approaches suggest focusing manual review on test suites rather than attempting to understand all generated implementation code.
- The shift raises a fundamental question: whether teams should adopt AI coding only when they're prepared to own and maintain the resulting software.
“But when you build software, you own it, and I don't only mean in the intellectual property sense. You also take on the responsibility for its quality and its security, and for debugging, operating, maintaining, and evolving it over time.”
Marty Lamb, Software engineer · Martian Software blog
Marty Lamb Software engineer and authorAdam Tornhill Software development analyst
The record 3 articles and posts · last 30 days
What people are saying 24 voices from 1 site · best of 86 · verbatim
- Aug 31
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The comment reads like flesh-generated language to me, but I might be fooled. The breadths of pro-AI sentiment is possibly astroturphed, but there's also an argument for an enthusiastic minority of people to write a lot more comments.As the person above said, AI has significantly increased my ability to execute on ideas. I always liked computers…
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There is an in between here that developers seem to keep forgetting: Design the software architecture yourself — do some whiteboarding, figure out your abstractions and your UML, then write that in your prompt for the LLM to implement through a plan.Velocity stays high. Cognitive overhead remains low. You know enough of your architecture from the…
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My father-in-law has (among other things) done a fair amount of editing or proofreading prose, mostly on paper with red and blue pens. He says that when the page looks like it's covered in blood, that means it was good writing. For bad writing, it's so bad that you can't really work with it.I would not want to take a block of text written by AI…
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The question of code ownership highlighted in some of the comments herein (e.g., "when you build software, you own it... "No, I specifically don’t. My company owns it...") takes me back to a paper I read years ago on password management and extrinsic risk: The basic idea was that employees have no real motivation to maintain password hygiene…
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>> I've never been the kind of coder >Looks like you were never really a coder, to be honest.I do not understand the bitterness here at all. AI is just a tool you can use for better or worse.I learnt basic programming at an old age of 10 and 6502 assembler 2 years later from (paper)books.There was no Internet and I dreamed of one day owning a…
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I’ve settled on a practice of having the agent write a lesson plan with quizzes for me, for any PR or feature of sufficient size to warrant it. It works pretty well and forces me into a back and forth with the model where I otherwise might be tempted to let it do whatever it wants.I published a skill and short article on the technique I settled on:
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Natural language can be ambiguous, though."The system should email the customer when their subscription renews."When? Which timezone? What should we email them? Which email address (the customer changed their email 10 minutes ago, the address at time of the charge?)I can look at a page of code and answer those questions pretty quickly.You could…
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> We’ve never needed to treat understanding our own code as a separate cost from writing it, because writing it largely forced us to understand it.Once a system gets to a certain scale, understanding it has always been a problem; it's just exacerbated in the age of LLMs. On many occasions, I've even seen folks write code they didn't understand, in…
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It's yours if during the generation process you correctly used the tool. e.g. You designed the architecture, you reviewed the generated code, you assisted all the development, you decided the type of tests and used your brain to guide the generation.It's not your code if you just said "implement this" and then you shipped it. It's going to…
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I think the worst part is that to the bullshit artists that usually float to the top of any org chart, AI generated docs, and implementation plans, and code is superficially plausible. It's hard to find any particular thing that is wrong with all of it - just a general vibe of verbosity. I am observing entire engineering departments drowning in AI…
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Interestingly enough, the question "do we want to support it" has been the main one (not "can we write it") in any sufficiently large and mature project for as long as I remember.Now, becoming large is now a solved problem essentially, but that's still only maybe 10-20% of the software engineering work in the long run. I'm grateful I can delegate…
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I also review all of my AI-generated code. I feel that it’s disrespectful to my teammates to send unverified slop for review.I’ve noticed that while my coding skills have very noticeably atrophied (to the point I am consciously scheduling time to manually code, just for practice), my ability to read and comprehend code quickly has actually…
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> Analogously, people can write in assembly, but can you write in assembly when the codebase is frequently altered by someone with an optimizing compiler?Yes. There's an interface boundary in the form of function prototypes and ABI rules. To the optimizing compiler, your assembly code is undistinguishable from separately compiled high-level code…
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> It’s crystal clear that AI can be a complexity factory.> keeping software understandable to humans a first-class design goal in the age of AI.I'm not sure this is going to be a worthwhile goal for much longer. Rarely is anyone caring about the complexity and comprehensibility of the ASM that GCC or LLVM generates from higher-level C code. I…
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I don't think these comparisons between AI generated code and an idealised version of the code are productive. We have to compare with code that exists in the real world, so AI against human, and not only that, good AI generated code with good human written code, as well as AI slop with human slop.I think if we did that we'd see that on average…
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You wouldn't be the first person to eventually conclude that C is just a very fancy macro assembler.But AI generated code is much like every other generated code: it is more voluminous and rather less elegant than what you'd write as a person. And here too there is a link with assembly: early compilers routinely put out absolutely terrible…
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What was the point to you? What I took away from the article is that AI adds a bunch of complexity that is making it harder, not easier to understand.And I'm saying that is true, but it's also enabling a kind of complexity and ambition in outcomes that might be a worthwhile trade-off.In the same way we accept that cars are no longer something that…
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My tiny two pet projects I keep developing with LLMs taught me how useful TDD is - I'm not a software engineer so I've been never formally introduced to these, but now I learn the best practices.So in consequence I have less bugs in this code than what I could achieve myself, and as a second outcome of these is a solid workspace templates that…
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There are deterministically computable metrics for cognitive complexity and readability[0].They’re not perfect by any means — and I suspect they’re already included in the RL process for coding evals, and have been for some time. I do think we’ll see ongoing improvement in this area though.[0] (pdf warning)
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Absolutely! I haven't had this much fun since I was coding MySpace layout glitter graphic websites in 2006 with PHP, MySQL, and CodeIgniter.I'm getting older, I have lots of ideas, and now I have tools that can help bring them together faster instead of spending two weeks obsessing about how I want to set up Ubuntu and have nothing to show for it…
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I don't believe that AI is the 'higher level of abstraction[1]' that it is often claimed to be. However I wonder if it's possible to work with a codebase when other developers are treating AI as a higher level of abstraction.Analogously, people can write in assembly, but can you write in assembly when the codebase is frequently altered by someone…
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> It’s crystal clear that AI can be a complexity factory.> I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what software would look like if we made keeping software understandable to humans a first-class design goal in the age of AI.I agree, and I've been thinking similarly. But I don't think there's anything "new" about what understandable and…
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I'm not OK with it, but I have no choice besides maybe quitting my job.I've also tried to understand the code that AI writes, but it's often insane and untangling it would slow me down so much that it would nullify the gains in speed that AI brings.To me, either companies realize they're spending a lot more money to ship crappier code and AI…
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Yes I'm more than okay. AI has enabled a scale of personal ambition I could only previously have dreamed of.I've never been the kind of coder who could easily sit down and get their thoughts out from mind to written lines. I've seen that happen in a few gifted individuals, and AI might be frustrating them, because for them, coding was never the…