this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
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In my experience, AI is an amplifier.
Good engineers will produce more good code, because they ask the right questions, know what good looks like and check the output.
Bad engineers will produce reams more bad code. The mistakes they make will be amplified. They will give wrong and incomplete instructions, won't see what the problems are with the result and will ship it anyway.
This amplification also means people will spend a larger proportion of time reviewing than coding, which I think is less interesting.
All of this is stuff that can, to some extent, be addressed with policy. You help and instruct juniors, encourage people to better understand and own their code, or at worst reprimand them if they don't.
You can adjust expectations of product managers and explain to them that more is not better, as it always has been. Faster development can often come with bugs and tech debt and this is more of the same.
All I've said above is puts aside the ethical arguments of using or not using AI of course. That's a separate can of worms entirely.
Provlem being is that it is not an equal amplifier.
Good engineer spends a morning going back and forth and maybe gets something done that wild have taken them all day.
Bad engineer puts first draft slop in production in a couple of minutes.
Bad engineer gets to put out something every few minutes, good engineer works too make it actually right instead of merely looking specifically right.
That's true, but spaghetti code was always faster to write than good code before as well. I will agree that the speed gap probably has grown though. That's why tools like AI need discipline.
If managers and engineers don't understand that their code will turn into garbage and the business will get reputational harm and lose customers / get sued / have more tech debt to fix and they'll eventually learn their lesson. In the meantime it's going to be a painful process where upper management see extra speed, expand their scope or downsize their staff, then learn that they have crumbling foundations and need to adjust. This has publically happened a few times already. Things will stabilize in time.