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by yusefnapora 68 days ago
Unfortunately, it seems that few of the people willing to pay money for software development actually care whether you understand the code or not. Unless it breaks in a publicly embarrassing way, of course. Then "you own the code" and the sacrificial human in the loop can be dredged out to take the blame.

All the incentives nudge you towards less and less critical evaluation of the output. The results of careful evaluation are much harder to measure than "this guy is cranking out 10x the code compared to last year!" And while you were busy thoughtfully internalizing the output, the guy next to you has been letting Strega Nona's pasta pot go brrr and spew another thousand lines of spaghetti on top, ready for you to review. Eventually "lgtm" becomes the default, and "do you want me to go ahead and implement that for you" starts sounding like the only way to keep your head above water.