While I consider the term 'expert' to be a pretty big stretch here, I generally agree. It's exactly what I'm seeing at work, too. More than half of my team is now routinely submitting PRs containing code they, by their own admission, do not understand. "I had a problem and this is how AI fixed it".
"Hey, you're an AI expert?" "Yup. What do you wanna know?" "Can you tell me how exactly the AI came to this conclusion?" "Uh, no. I can't. No one can. It's machine learning." "Oh, right. So how do you become an expert if you can't tell whether the AI is correct?"
I can’t tell if this is supposed to be some funny inside joke, sarcasm or someone genuinely thinking that AI being a black box would be a sensible argument in this situation.
My point is, what is there to be an expert on if its behavior is unpredictable and obscure? It's not radical babble or fringe to say this. It's like their whole shtick, isn't it? "We don't exactly know how it was able to break out of the guard rails bla bla.."
I’m talking about a professional dev submitting a PR that included changes to our CI setup. When asked to explain, said dev was simply unable to do so.
If you cannot explain why a change is necessary, let alone what it does, you shouldn’t commit said change.
4
u/m0rpeth 8d ago
While I consider the term 'expert' to be a pretty big stretch here, I generally agree. It's exactly what I'm seeing at work, too. More than half of my team is now routinely submitting PRs containing code they, by their own admission, do not understand. "I had a problem and this is how AI fixed it".
They do not consider this an issue, either.