Does it matter if the developers understand the system they maintain?
I guess that depends whether the genAI maximalists turn out to be right.
Are they maintaining it if all they do is type prompts into Claude?
They may be doing a poor job of it - time will tell.
But, at present, they're still the ones merging PRs and deploying changes to production.
If a person in a Chinese Room doesn't actually understand Chinese, though the system as a whole behaves as if it does - can we say that the engineer merging PRs and deploying to production understands the system or maintains it?
Do you have people frantically trying to reverse engineer a basically unfamiliar-to-them code base at 2am while bleeding cash?
I've certainly seen people on this site defend that idea vociferously.
I won't tell you it's impossible - Claude does do legitimately amazing things.
It does not, however, seem to me to actually have deep understanding of what it's doing. "Amazing" does not mean "admirable" or "trustworthy."