Cory Doctorow: Code is a liability (not an asset)

An old post from Jan this year, but I just love the language Doctorow uses (emphasis mine)

Code is a liability (not an asset). Tech bosses don’t understand this. They think AI is great because it produces 10,000 times more code than a programmer, but that just means it’s producing 10,000 times more liabilities. AI is the asbestos we’re shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society

A bit rage baity, but I agree with the core premise. That AI is really good at generating code, but it doesn’t do the “Software Engineering” piece very well.

Meanwhile, “software engineering” is a discipline that subsumes “writing code,” but with a focus on the long-term operations of the system the code is part of.

[…]

“Writing code” is about making code that runs well. “Software engineering” is about making code that fails well. It’s about making code that is legible – whose functions can be understood by third parties who might be asked to maintain it, or might be asked to adapt the processes downstream, upstream or adjacent to the system to keep the system from breaking. It’s about making code that can be adapted, for example, when the underlying computer architecture it runs on is retired and has to be replaced, either with a new kind of computer, or with an emulated version of the old computer

Teams are addressing this in these ways:

1. Human review: Obviously not sustainable – the volume of code generated is so massive there’s no way a human can review every line of code.
2. Agent reviewed: Possible but still in its infancy – though even when using strong guardrails and independent AIs to review agenticly generated code, there are shared blind spots in models which are hard to identify and correct without human intervention.
3. Vibe coded: No review of the codebase at all – and as Doctorow pointed out, seems to be what is happening with engineers being asked to produce code at 10x, 100x or even 10,000x the current rate.

The debate shouldn’t be AI-generated code vs. no AI-generated code – to follow the metaphor, it should be about installation standards.

Asbestos is safe if you have the right safety standards and guardrails – though unfortunately teams are either not inspecting at all, or trying to inspect at a scale no human can sustain.

Agent-reviewed pipelines are the early, rough version of an installation standard for AI code – and that’s the piece worth investing in.

Pluralistic: Code is a liability (not an asset) (06 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow