AI Coding Tools Are Creating Systems Nobody Fully Understands
There's a particular kind of meeting that happens in engineering organizations around eighteen months after a major productivity push. The team is larger now, or the tooling is better, or both. Deployments are faster. The metrics look good. And then somebody asks, in a slightly too-casual tone, whether anyone actually understands how the payment reconciliation service decides what to retry—and the room goes quiet in a way that has nothing to do with shyness.
That quiet is the sound of accrued debt collecting interest.
I've been in that room more times than I'd like. Once a team had spent eight months chasing a 40th-percentile latency regression that turned out to live in a utility function nobody recognized as theirs. Once, an on-call engineer, during a P0 incident at 2 AM, was reading auto-generated code he'd never seen before, produced by a colleague six months prior using a tool that no...
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