7 years experience as a developer or thereabouts. Its probably been a year since the agentic coding stuff has become really widespread, picking up pace a lot around jan. Even the old hands, 20 years plus at the company and those few holdouts who refused to use AI before are deep in it now.

We're at a product company, not a consultancy. Hard to say exactly about tech, the tech is namely the product, but its b2b, so massive contracts move like glaciers, customer purchase decisions are often as much or more about the claims we made as the reality of the code.

As for outages, its the same as it always was. We have our testing, in layers. unit tests, integrations, e2e, staging envs. Layers and layers before it reaches the customer. If there ever is something that reaches there, as has happened, its so hard to pin the blame on AI, and of course we run a blameless culture here anyhow. Tickets are assigned, emergency patches are made, and the behemoth lumbers on. I don't think AI makes our defences much better though. We catch the things we always caught, and miss those we always missed, in greater and greater volume.

I don't pin blame on stupid management or whatever, I think this is complacency rather than a specific effort to push ai, as some claim. AI has just made it easier to work on more and understand less, and this is the result, no external intervention needed. I don't have a solution other than observing that trying to stop this is fighting the tides. People used to hate working on legacy codebases, where the original developers werent around to explain themselves, now everything is a legacy codebase right from inception - even if you personally don't use ai, the job is fundamentally different.

Thanks a lot for sharing your story. It's incredibly valuable to hear specifics like that.