Plausible Code Is the New Technical Debt

I have a take that is going to annoy two groups of people at the same time: The “real engineers don’t use AI” crowd The “AI wrote my whole app” crowd Here it is: If AI is in your workflow, your codebase is now a human factors problem. Not a model problem. Not a prompt problem. A human problem. Because the hardest part is no longer generating code. The hardest part is knowing what to trust, what to delete, what to keep, and what you are willing to be responsible for at 2:00 AM when prod is on fire and the person who “helped” is a chat bubble with no pager. The new sin is not bad code. It’s unowned code. AI makes it easy to produce code that looks plausible. That’s the trap. Plausible is not correct. Plausible is not maintainable. Plausible is not secure. Plausible is not even consistent with your repo. Plausible just means your brain gets a quick dopamine hit and says: “ship it.” So here’s the controversial thing I think we should start saying out loud: If you did not read it, you did n