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Comment by Ozzie_osman | Hacker News Reader

I think the antidote is ownership. Every part of a company or product needs some person or small group that owns it, understands it, and feels ownership over its long-term health. They review or decide what level of review changes to it can take.

So much of what makes high-functioning teams work is a sense of ownership and stewardship, and what makes low-functioning teams break is a lack thereof. Someone with pride, drive, and a high standard feeling responsible for a particular area or thing.

In the past, that ownership could be individual or collective, but with AI and a lot more lane-crossing, ownership should tend toward smaller groups (or individuals).

A developer can design, but a designer needs to review it. A designer can code, but the owner of the code must review it.

This might feel like gatekeeping, but it's the only way.

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Fortunately, the widespread use of LLMs results in companies reducing the number of things each team owns, and/or leaving lots of engineers on payroll who suddenly have abundant free time with which to start self-learning and developing a sense of ownership of parts of the product.

Wait...

Nobody in this game of musical chairs wants the music to stop because there's poop on all of them.

I agree but don't see it working out. Ownership implies that a person or a team becomes irreplaceable or at least more difficult to replace. People stop being resources and go back to being people. Management is not going to like that.

At one business I was a part of where that experiment was tried, it failed badly. In reality, people were being switched around on projects and the "owner" was changing every few months. The end result was quite messy, both in terms of technical debt and politics(about who's the final decision maker).

>I think the antidote is ownership.

I've said this before, but people gloss over this fact.

>Someone with pride, drive, and a high standard feeling responsible for a particular area or thing.

I've also said this before, but AI-glazers just respond with "I think we may just have to let go of pride & kudos and their connection to our identity."

Most people who vibecode don't give a shit about their work. Any solution is a solution as long as it works.

>This might feel like gatekeeping, but it's the only way.

Gatekeeping is not inherently bad. We want gatekeeping.

If I'm getting surgery, I want an actual doctor with proven credentials to do it.

And to anyone claiming that software doesn't kill, please look up "Therac-25" or the 65 people that died due to Tesla's "Full Self-Driving".

Of course there are examples of software killing or being capable of killing (operating machinery or medical devices), but that doesn't apply to probably 90+% of software

Should've made my example a bit less extreme, but other forms of harm exist:

Downtime causing monetary damage (This one is obvious...)

Improper security measures causing leaks of customer data, making the victims a target for spam, or in extreme cases, identity theft, scams and (spear)phishing. One of the reasons why I am strongly opposed to having every random calorie counter app requiring you to sign up for an account asking you for your email and/or phone number.

I also recently saw a post here on HN about how VSCode had a bug that caused all commits to have a "Co-authored bv Copilot" line in the commit message, even if Copilot was disabled. One of the top replies mentioned how this could cause issues with employees working for companies that disallow the use of Copilot.

When you take these risks into account, I'm pretty sure you cover the vast majority of software.

What you need is ownership of not just the code but ownership of the company if your work is your own then you care a lot more about then if it belongs to someone else.

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