“…I'd say most engineers who've worked on large-scale projects never really had an ability to understand 100% of the code anyway, right?”
The Stack Overflow Podcast · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · August 2026
Gutmans was answering the worry that AI-written code leaves engineers without real understanding of the systems they own. His answer denies the premise: at enterprise scale nobody was reading every line before agents either. He allows Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel as a possible exception, then argues review effort should be spent by judgment rather than spread evenly.
Transcript
…to use Gemini, to use the agent, give them a problem, see how they're approaching it, how they, you know, how they think, reason through the problem, how they're actually guiding the agent, right? So I think this is just a natural progression of us having the opportunity to use agents at work.
…He's like, Hey, engineers are concerned that they don't understand the code they're writing. And his response was, they never did. Did you, have you heard that recently? Did you that mean anything to you to hear that, you know what, you just never did really know the code you wrote? Does it matter?
Yeah, you know, I mean, I'd say most engineers who've worked on large-scale projects never really had an ability to understand 100% of the code anyway, right? They kind of understand the subset of code that they were working on, maybe some of the JSON modules. But maybe Linus understands the full Linux kernel end-to-end. But I would say in most enterprise settings, you usually don't have a single engineer who understands every, you know, who knows every line of code. So I think to a certain degree, that's been kind of the environment. I actually think…
Yeah, that's really interesting. It makes me think about how do we make sure that we spend the right amount of human work on the code review or evaluating what's being changed versus the agent. I love, I mean, I don't, personally, I've coded some stuff myself and it's actually enjoyable. But you…
Look, I think like anything at work, you know, no one reviews everything 100% of the time. So you kind of use your judgment on where do I need a review? Where do I not need a review? This is the whole question around where do you need a human in the loop and where can you actually use an autonomous…
Yeah, I was just reading that article recently where there were some questions about how Waymo would continue in certain industry, in certain areas. And I'm like, yeah, human car crashes are a thing.
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