Prestige or Accountability?

A delivery-company CEO wrote something the other day, roughly this. We shipped in two weeks what the competitors quoted at three months, for a third of the price. AI writes the code, we are the architects. And to you who still writes every line yourself, drop the prestige, we get paid to solve problems, not to write code by hand.

I agreed with almost every word. Except one.

Two things that are not the same

Not writing the code by hand is one thing. Not owning the code is another. They sound alike in the same sentence, but in practice they are opposites.

I do not write every line by hand either anymore. AI drafts it, I am the one who understands the business and makes the decisions about how it should be built. There we agree. The coding, the part that used to take weeks, is no longer where the time should go.

But then comes the slide. Drop the prestige about writing every line, it is said, and soon it means drop the prestige about reading every line. That is where we part. To stop writing by hand is efficiency. To stop reading is to look away.

Prestige is about ego

Prestige is wanting to be seen doing the work. Look how much I wrote, look how many lines, look how hard it was. That prestige you should drop. It was never about the customer, it was about me.

Accountability is something else. Accountability is that someone answers when it breaks. Not the tool, not the model, a human with a name. It has nothing to do with ego. On the contrary, it is barely prestigious at all. Sitting there with the consequence once the applause has died down.

Confusing the two is what makes the argument dangerous. Because when you drop the prestige it feels like maturity. And in the same motion you drop the accountability, and that feels the same way too, right up until something breaks.

Where the difference shows

The difference does not show in the demo. It does not show in the quote, not in the two weeks, not in the third of the price. It shows in production, a month later, when the solution meets real users and real data and does something no one accounted for.

Then the question is simple. Who owned the lines? The one who dropped the prestige, or the one who kept the accountability? A delivery that is fast and cheap and that no one read is not a good deal. It is a debt with a short repayment period.

A model that wrote ninety percent of the code still cannot be held accountable for a single line. That is not a technical limitation that goes away with the next version. It is what accountability is. It requires someone who can suffer from being wrong.

You can do both

This is not an argument for writing code by hand. It is an argument for reading it. You can let AI write every line and still own every line. That is not a contradiction. That is the whole point.

To own a line means I understand why it is there, that I can explain what it does, that I have checked that it does the right thing. Who wrote it first is beside the point. That someone read it and answers for it is everything.

So, prestige or accountability

Drop the prestige. That part was right. The prestige of writing it all yourself was always an obstacle, it made the work slower and it was about the wrong thing.

But do not drop the accountability in the same motion. Let AI write the code. Read every line. Put your name to it. That is not prestige. That is the job.

See also: A Computer Can Never Be Held Accountable (series 49) and The Law Doesn't Count the Words (series 51).