Introduction
I want to tell you about a feeling I kept having at work.
Our team was shipping faster than ever. Tests passed. Deployments were clean. Leadership was happy. By every metric we tracked, things were going great.
But in incident calls, I started noticing something uncomfortable. Someone would ask "why does the system behave like this under load?" and the call would go quiet. Not because the engineers were incompetent — they were brilliant. But because the answer lived in code that an AI had written three sprints ago, and nobody had really internalized it. We'd reviewed it. We'd approved it. But we didn't truly own it the way you own something you built yourself at 2am fighting a bug.
I couldn't name what I was watching happen. Now I can.
