Accept All, Understand None

Pressing enter to accept model suggestions now takes less effort than scrolling past it. One keystroke, and the code is yours. Reading it, understanding it, deciding if it's actually right, that part hasn't gotten any faster. That gap, between how fast we can accept code and how fast we can actually understand it, is where things start to go wrong. The new shape of technical debt We used to know where technical debt came from. Tight deadline, cut corner, # TODO: comment that nobody ever revisits. Rushing was the cause, and we could at least point to it. Now you can build up the same kind of debt on a calm Tuesday afternoon, no deadline in sight, just six suggestions in a row accepted because they looked fine and the flow felt good. Nobody rushed you, and the code still ended up just as unexamined. Same debt, just a different excuse. "It works" is not the same as "I understand why it works" Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? — Brian Kernighan, 1974 Fifty years later, the gap got wider. Kernighan was talking about code you wrote. At least you understood it once. A suggestion that compiles, passes the linter, survives code review and even comes with passing tests can still be standing on a wrong assumption that nobody caught, because nobody was reading it as code. They were reading it as output, and output that makes sense tends to get approved. Compiling is a low bar. Passing tests is a slightly higher one, depending on whether you wrote the tests, or its suggestion shaped or created those too. If it's the second, it's like grading its homework with its own answers. None of it tells you the logic is sound, that the edge cases are covered, or that it does what you actually needed, something we already learned every time we trusted code we didn't write. Somehow it's easy to forget it the moment the code appears inline, in our own edito