[ativzzz]

I think this is company culture. You're asking how to make your engineers give enough of a damn about their output to spend the extra time understanding it.

Did they do this before AI? Does the company really, truly care about software quality or are they just trying to ship features?

Things like

- in depth code reviews

- encouraging sharing knowledge and helping others

- dedicating time to address technical debt

- giving engineers freedom to explore technologies and solutions

- following best practices for software dev

- hiring the right people

This is one of those things you can't enforce, but your leadership can encourage it by setting examples. If your company does not care about understanding the software by carving out time and explicitly encouraging it, then employees won't either.

[frez1]

Im the pre-AI era you could ask engineers to write a document and that proves they've thought/ not thought a problem space out. having docs be an important part of your company culture was essentially the forcing function for everything else.

With AI, docs are now very cheap to produce and not immediately proof of thought.

e.g. if you see something that doesn't make sense you can't just ask the author to write a doc for it anymore, because they'll just feed that to an LLM.