the loop closed

A coworker and I reviewed a code change last week. Neither of us read it. I wrote it with claude. I reviewed it with claude. He reviewed it with claude. My terminal said the fix was correct. His said it was wrong.

His was right. The network port I was moving lived in one config file. The file I had changed was a different one, which has never held that port in any version of the software. I had wasted time ‘carefully’ regenerating a config file that had nothing to do with the bug.

So he pasted the problems into a Teams message. I pasted the message into the model. It agreed with itself, rewrote the fix, and this time it was correct.

That was the review. Two engineers, four exchanges, the same model on both ends of the wire.

The AI tool use is mandated. The mandate came from managers. The managers received their own mandate from executives. The executives were advised to mandate it by the people who sell it. They monitor our usage patterns to “know” that we use it.

Nobody in that chain is behaving unreasonably given what the person above them said. The man at the top is just the guy selling it. I can’t describe the arrangement in a way that doesn’t sound paranoid, but it isn’t paranoid; It’s just the org chart.

Here is what did not move.

If that change had shipped wrong, and field devices had come up advertising a port they were not listening on, there is no ambiguity about whose name is on the commit. Not the model’s. Not the manager’s. Not the vendor’s.

The work moved. The accountability stayed exactly where it was.

I’ve watched people describe this as augmentation. Augmentation would mean I could do more than I could before. What actually happened is that the doing left and the answering for it did not.

I remember reviewing code by reading it. Not as a discipline or a practice, just as the only available option. You opened the diff. You thought about it until you understood it or until you were sure you didn’t.

That was recent. It already feels like a story about a different profession.

The before-time compresses fast. A few months in, I find I can’t describe the old way without it sounding like nostalgia, and nostalgia is easy to dismiss, so I mostly don’t bring it up. Everyone I work with is doing the same arithmetic and reaching the same silence.

Are humans nothing more than meat machines?

The part I can’t argue with is that the bug got caught.

A real defect, in a real file, found before it shipped, by exactly the process I’m complaining about. If I had read the diff myself I might have caught it. I might not have. I didn’t read the diff.

That day, I stopped being the engineer on the change and became a secretary for a machine. I don’t know exactly when or for how long, but I know I was at least paid for the day.