I recently joined a team with a very messy codebase. The devs were long gone, and even the ones maintaining it didn’t really understand large parts of the code. The bus factor was effectively zero.

What surprised me was how useful AI was. It helped me not only understand the code but also infer the probable intent behind it, which made debugging much faster. I started generating documentation directly from the code itself.

For me, this was a big win. Code is the source of truth. Developer documentation and even shared knowledge are often full of bias, selective memory, or the “Chinese whispers” problem where the story shifts every time it’s retold and never documented. Code doesn’t lie, it just needs interpretation. Using AI to cut through the noise and let the code explain itself felt like a net positive.