AI Turned Every Developer Into QA
Photo by Compagnons on Unsplash
There’s a strange thing happening in software development right now. It’s AI. It was always going to be AI.
While management thinks AI is making developers more productive, what is actually happening is unfinished work is multiplying like rabbits in Spring.
At my company we’ve always been short on resources, I think it’s been something about keeping costs low and hang the human consequences. Testing? Our developers do it. Documentation? Developers. Production support? Developers do it. If something goes wrong at 2 a.m., congratulations, you’re now in operations too.
The “cross-functional engineer” was already doing about four jobs.
Now we’ve added another one.
It’s not the one you might think.
AI Productivity
If you think I’m railing against being a babysitter for our AI overlords you’re reading the wrong blog.
Because we have AI our management and leadership thinks that we can swap teams “without friction” and move to wherever the need is in the company.
You don’t know how the team works. You don’t know the people in the team. You don’t know the codebase. Onboarding is a complete mess (nonexistent for our teams) and you’re given a fixed deadline that needs to be met (no one knows why, you simply need to meet it).
The personal cost to this is high, you’re expected to make up the gap in knowledge yourselves. That’s bad.
What is worse is this is happening with much more regularity after the advent of AI.
Our Jobs
Move faster. Fix it. Implement our changes (ticket written by Claude, with inaccuracies of course). Review this (AI generated slop) and help make the PR acceptable so it doesn’t crash our entire business.
Nobody asks why adding 14 abstractions and three design patterns to change a button color might not be ideal. We aren’t really allowed to ask the questions.
You wouldn’t have the time anyway. Because you’re working on the new resource constrained project with a tight deadline and you need to deliver, deliver, deliver.
We are in a new world where the author doesn’t understand the code they’ve delivered, and worse we’ve been divorced from the context of our code. We are delivering more code, but that doesn’t mean we should be.
AI Has Destroyed The Last Incentive To Understand Systems
The strangest part is that companies are simultaneously demanding developers move between projects faster than ever.
“Can you help Team B this sprint?”
“Can you review this backend PR?”
“Can you jump into this other product area?”
Previously that required onboarding, understanding domain logic, and actually learning how systems worked.
Now the expectation is apparently:
“Just ask AI”
You can feel the standards collapsing in real time.
When you ask someone a question over Slack you’re probably using AI to frame the question. You don’t really understand what you’re asking so you use AI to help you. The thing is on the other side the respondent is using AI to answer the question. Basically we just have two AI agents talking to each other with meatbags in the way who are just slowing things down.
Sure, humans can offer value by knowing the people. Understanding the context of the code and why it is how it is (why the hacks have been implemented how they have, that’s what that means).
Developers used to slowly build context over months or years. They’d understand why certain architectural decisions existed. They’d know where the dangerous parts of the system were buried. They’d remember the production outage from two years ago that nobody documented properly.
That knowledge mattered.
Now?
The belief seems to be that context is optional because AI can generate “something close enough”.
Which means software engineers are slowly being transformed into the same interchangeable resource pool management already treated other departments as.
Move ticket here. Generate code there. Paste prompt. Ship feature. Next sprint.
Nobody owns anything.
Nobody understands anything.
Everyone reviews everything.
And this time that is the conclusion.
About The Author
Professional Software Developer “The Secret Developer” can be found on Twitter @TheSDeveloper and regularly publishes articles through Medium.com
The Secret Developer suspects half of Agile could be replaced by a shared Google Doc and a little bit of courage.