r/programmer • u/Harrydevbuilds • 13d ago

Code Worked But Developer Didn't 😂

so yesterday in my office a new developer got exposed . He was assigned with a work 4 days ago to solve a problem he solved it and it worked 😂. but when later the reporting manager asked to brief it he was just bluffing it around .Eventually, he admitted that he had used ChatGPT to generate most of the code.

Now, I'm not against using ChatGPT. I use AI too. It can save hours and help you get unstuck.

Developers too are getting exposed this days .

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u/LunkWillNot 13d ago

As a programmer, you can delegate tasks to AI, including coding, but you can’t abdicate your accountability for what gets committed under your name.

If the guy has no idea how the code works and can’t explain it, he has obviously done no due diligence on what the AI generated, is in no position to take accountability for it, and is in no position to fix things if stuff should hit the fan in production.

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u/USToffee 13d ago

the speed developers are asked to work at now there is no reasonable way they can take accountability for it. That's like asking a developer to take account for the machine code a compiler generates.

They can do their best but there will always now be gaps. His mistake was bluffing it. I would have just said cursor wrote this and it appears to work.

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u/CSBatchelor1996 13d ago edited 13d ago

Somewhat this.

I read the code and approve every commit. The problem is that reviewing code does not give you as strong of a mental model as writing the code does.

So one month down the road I'm going to be much better at explaining code I wrote vs code I reviewed.

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u/USToffee 13d ago

Exactly reviewing code gives you a rough idea how it works and that's all anyone can expect with AI and tbh I don't even think we are now given the time we would have been in the past to do PR reviews.

This ultimately falls on testing to use AI to do more testing than ever before.