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.
Trying to enforce "deep understanding" is optimizing wrong layer.
Focus on:
. Fast rollback
. Good observability
. Small PRs
Understanding become emergent, not enforced.
We also have the problem that a (junior) engineer may not have the skills to understand the AI code.
When you writes code yourself, you only use concepts you have come across previously. But if you generate an AI solution, it may well use concepts one has not previously come across.
What do we expect a junior engineer to do then, if they do not have time to learn the concepts used ?
Do we really think they will reject the AI code and implement their own, more familiar, solution ?
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.
> Company is pushing for AI-first
> But how do we enforce engineers to have a deep understanding of the code that they are shipping?
By not pushing AI-first mindset. When you start tracking token usage metrics, people will optimize for that metric.
If you don't push them, and tell to use AI as a tool, they will optimize for understanding the code
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Trying to enforce "deep understanding" is optimizing wrong layer. Focus on: . Fast rollback . Good observability . Small PRs Understanding become emergent, not enforced.
We also have the problem that a (junior) engineer may not have the skills to understand the AI code.
When you writes code yourself, you only use concepts you have come across previously. But if you generate an AI solution, it may well use concepts one has not previously come across.
What do we expect a junior engineer to do then, if they do not have time to learn the concepts used ? Do we really think they will reject the AI code and implement their own, more familiar, solution ?