this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
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Except I have plenty of experience dealing with this from humans. (Mainly from the aforementioned new managers, because being wrong with confidence seems to be a key trait to get promoted.) It's been my experience that when you tell an AI "I just tried that and it didn't work", it will accept that more readily than a human would.
Every bit of AI-generated code that I use, even in the smallest and most meaningless context, has to pass my own review first. I have to understand every line, and if I don't I will ask the bot to explain what it did. By the time I am done with it, I can stand behind it just as if I wrote it all myself. I might note that I got AI help, but if my name is on the commit I will not pass the buck on any errors.
I don't trust A.I. code at all. If I ever do use it, I use it as a research tool like "please google for me how to do this one obscure thing because IDK what search query to use"; then I type out it's output manually. Usually as I do so, I come across some subtle error that would cause horrible problems, and fix it as I go.
I tried to use it for a mathematical algorithm once. I might as well have just written
return Math.random();This is a good thing to do if your goal is to gain a deep understanding of something.
If it's just to get it done, I just enforce TDD on my agent and review it's output. I don't need to be an expert in everything (and I am very much a generalist). But if you focus on a very specific thing and only that thing, then yeah what you are doing is a great way to truly understand it. It's slow, but it's totally valid.
Can you really say your code is done if you can't understand it?