Can You Explain It?" Airbnb's One Rule for AI-Written Code

Airbnb's CTO says 60% of its code is now AI-written. He has one rule for it.

Ahmad Al-Dahle shared this in a Latent Space interview this week.

Features shipped: up nearly 80% year over year.

Pull-request throughput: up 1.6 times per engineer.

Big numbers. But there is a catch.

They come from Airbnb's own CTO. Nobody outside the company has checked them.

The rule is the part I keep thinking about.

Every engineer must be able to explain what they built. Even when AI wrote it. "The model did it" is not an answer.

His reason is junior engineers. If AI does most of the work, where do they build craft and judgment?

I went through the main insights of the interview in this week's episode of The Human in the Loop.

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