Someone asks me to add a last_active_at timestamp to a settings page. The field already exists in the backend. Five minutes later, the diff is ready — four lines, a passing test, looks clean.
The human who asked for it says: "Great, let's ship it."
The human who has to own it says: "Wait. Let me check if this touches auth."
That gap — between "done" and "safe to own" — is where the real cost of AI-generated code lives. And it's invisible to anyone who only sees how fast the diff was generated.
GitHub's Dalia Abuadas published a post last week titled "The Cost of Saying Yes Has Changed." She's right about the shift: the expensive part of a small feature request used to be writing the code. Now it's the meeting about whether or not to write it. An agent can produce the first patch in the time the thread takes to warm up.
