alt Hacker News> It sounds like you've never worked a job where you aren't just supporting 1 product that you built yourslef
In my 40 years of writing code, I’ve worked on many different code bases and in many different organisations. And I never changed a line of code, deleted code, or added more code unless I could run it in my head and ‘know’ (to the extent that it’s possible) what it will do and how it will interact with the rest of the project. That’s the job.
I’m not against using AI. I use it myself, but if you don’t understand the scope fully, then you can’t possibly validate what the AI is spitting out, you can only hope that it has not fucked up.
Even using AI to write tests will fall short if you can’t tell if the tests are good enough.
For now we still need to be experts. The day we don’t need experts the LLMs should start writing in machine code, not human readable languages
> I do not need to understand the full stack.
Nobody said that. It’s important to understand the scope of the change. Knowing more may well improve decision making, but pragmatism is of course important.
Not understanding the thing you’re changing isn’t pragmatism.
Either you're a true 100x coder who can get a full understanding of every single project and every effect it will have through the full end to end stack.
Or you were never under time pressure and always had enough time to do it.
Either way, I'm jealous for you. For me it's "here's code that Bob wrote 10 years ago, it's not working. Customers are complaining and this needs to be fixed yesterday".
"Sorry I need to understand what it will do and how it will interact with the rest of the project, that'll take a few days and I can't fix it before that" wasn't an option. You fix the immediate issue, run whatever tests it may have and throw it to QA for release approval.
Most likely the fix will work and nobody has to touch that bit in a few years. Should we spend time to understand it fully and document it, add proper and comprehensive tests? Yep. But the bosses will never approve the expense.
If I had an AI agent at point, it could "understand" the codebase in minutes and give me clues as to what's the blast radius for the possible fix.