I'm experiencing similar rubber stamping around my company.

CEO hired an AI forward CTO / Head of Engineering. He said at his last company his directive was NOT to look at code anymore.

I've watched thousands of lines of misguided, verbose, brittle code (but there's 24 tests that nobody reads) go essentially straight into production. Nobody understands it, we're adding so much trash documentation that is impossible to keep up with.

It's an absolute train wreck, I feel farther away from the system than I did when I started. Commit messages / PR descriptions are to be generated by AI (and pushed).

It's only broken production code a couple of times so far, but my guess is as this continues we will be unable to maintain the codebase without AI involved.

AI can be a force multiplier, we are not using it that way.

My main issue with it is that when a human developer broke the production codebase there is generally an "A-Ha" moment, like, "oh no... I know exactly what that error means, let me run a hotfix and we can change things so that doesn't happen again."

Now we're at the full behest of Claude "do you see what happened to our codebase, robot? Can you help fix it?". Not a fun place to be...