this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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Asklemmy
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How do you deal with the lack of understanding of the codebase? The company thinks they pay programmers to write code, but in my experience they actually are paying for someone to understand the whole thing. When something goes wrong in production do you just ask AI to identify the problem?
Well, I’ve used AI professionally and personally. Professionally, I already know how the code works because I worked on this codebase prior to AI. However, there are always things I forget and areas I don’t know well. I’ve found AI really helps me understand the codebase because I can ask it how some piece works and it will answer very quickly without me spending a couple hours tracing code paths.
Personally, I’ve written apps without understanding the code at all. I don’t even open an IDE and look at the code since I don’t really need to. Instead, I look at the app I’m building and tell the AI what bugs I find or what features I want to add. For some aspects, it helps to have an engineering background when the AI asks your implementation preferences and asks you to decide between a few options that involve different trade offs. But, these are high-level decisions.
Professionally, our system is more complex than the apps I build personally and I also need to be really careful about not breaking backwards compatibility for any changes we make. Personally, I don’t have as many concerns like this.
But, I do suspect some day our professional systems will fully automate code changes and manage complex changes across systems on their own with concern for backwards compatibility.
In my company, the C level is pushing hard for AI adoption so everyone is expected to use AI to write code.
Basically, yes. I am no longer programmer but more like software architect or manager. Architecting the design and reviewing AI plan and code.