The error message appeared at 2:17 a.m. Something about a null reference in a service that hadn’t been touched in weeks. The developer on call pulled up the relevant file, read through it, and felt a familiar but newly uncomfortable sensation.

She had written this code. Her name was in the commit history. But she hadn’t really written it. She’d accepted it. Reviewed it in the way you review something when you’re moving fast, and the output looks right, and the tests pass. The AI had generated the logic. She had approved the shape of it. And now, at 2:17 a.m., she needed to understand not just what it did but why it did it that way: what assumption it was built on, what edge case it was avoiding, what the author had been thinking.

There was no author. Not in the sense that mattered.