alt Hacker News> most orgs are used to responding to a daytime alert by calling out, “Who just shipped that change?” assuming that whoever merged the diff surely understands how it works and can fix it post-haste. What happens when nobody wrote the code you just deployed, and nobody really understands it?
I assume the first time this happens at any given company will be the moment they realize fully autonomous code changes made on production systems by agents is a terrible idea and every change needs a human to take responsibility for and ownership of it, even if the changes were written by an LLM.
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I think the opposite will happen - leadership will forego this attitude of "reverse course on the first outage".
Teams will figure out how to mitigate such situations in future without sacrificing the potential upside of "fully autonomous code changes made on production systems" (e.g invest more in a production-like env for test coverage).
Software engineering purists have to get out of some of these religious beliefs
If companies were generally capable of that level of awareness they would not operate the way that they do.
What happens if the person who wrote the code went on vacation? What happens if the code is many years old and no current team member has touched the code?
Understanding code you didn't personally write is part of the job.