To be on the hook is to be the one who answers when something breaks. Every team carries a picture of where that hook hangs. This is about whether the picture was ever true.
It’s the first question any skeptical engineering leader asks about this model. The agent implements from a spec the team agreed on. Something breaks in production. Who’s on the hook?
The question assumes an answer that was never true to begin with.
Before any of this, when a dev wrote the code by hand and it broke in production, it wasn’t that dev on the hook. It was the team. The PR got reviewed and approved by someone else. The design got discussed before anyone opened an editor. Production incidents got postmortems, not disciplinary letters with one name on them. Accountability was never individual. It just felt that way because one person’s hands were on the keyboard.
Nothing about that changes here. A part of the work moved to an agent. The team is still what’s on the hook, because the team was always the unit of accountability, not the person typing.
