This tradeoff of unfamiliarity with the codebase is a very well understood problem for decades. Maintaining a project is 99% of the time spent on a successful project.
In my opinion though, having AI write the initial code is just putting most people in a worse situation with almost no upside long term.
I don’t know. Ever had the experience of looking at 5+ year old code and thinking “what idiot wrote this crap” and then checking “git blame” and realising “oh, I’m the idiot… why the hell did I do this? struggling to remember” - given enough time, humans start to forget why they did things a certain way… and sometimes the answer is simply “I didn’t know any better at the time, I do now”
> You don't get that with AI. The codebase is always new.
It depends on how you use AI… e.g. I will often ask an AI to write me code to do X because it gets me over the “hump” of getting started… but now this code is in front of me on the screen, I think “I don’t like how this code is written, I’m going to refactor it…” and by the time I’m done it is more my code than the AI’s
How well does your team work when you can't even answer a simple question about your system because nobody wrote, tested, played with the code in question?
How do you answer "Is it possible for our system to support split payments?" when not a single member of your team has even worked on the billing code?
No, code reviews do not familiarize an average dev to the level of understanding the code in question.
- git blame
- always write good commit messages
< When using GenAI tools, the effort invested in critical thinking
< shifts from information gathering to information verification;
< from problem-solving to AI response integration; and from task
< execution to task stewardship.
(And, if you like, do as TFA says and rephrase the code into your own house style as you’re transcribing it. It’ll be better for it, and you’ll be mentally parsing the code you’re copying at a deeper level.)
I'm amazed that people don't see this. Absolutely nobody would claim that copying a novel is the same thing as writing a novel.
That's dreadful. Not only is familiarity with the code not valued, it is impossible to build for your own sake/sanity.
Writing code is easier than long term maintenance. Any programmer is able to write so much code that he will not be able to maintain it. Unless there are good AI tools helping with maintenance there is no point to use generative tools for production code. From my experience AI tools are great for prototyping or optimizing procrastination.
You are now responsible for learning how to use LLMs well. If an untrained vibe coder is more productive for me, while knowing nothing about how the code actually works, I will hire the vibe coder instead of you.
Learning is important, but it's most important that you learn how to use the best tools available so you can be productive. LLMs are not going away and they will only get better, so today that means you are responsible for learning how to use them, and that is already more important for most many roles than learning how to code yourself.