Git Knows Who. AI Knows What. Nobody Knows Why.

Siddharth Pandey Posted on May 31 Git Knows Who. AI Knows What. Nobody Knows Why. Modern software development has achieved incredible things. AI can generate entire features. Editors can autocomplete your thoughts before you've finished having them. Agents can open PRs while you're still reading the ticket. And yet, despite all this progress, there is still one question capable of ruining a senior engineer's afternoon: Why the hell does this code exist? Consider this innocent little gem: if ( distance < 50 ) { return ; } Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Looks simple. AI can explain it. Git can tell you who wrote it. The PR can tell you when it was merged. But nobody can tell you why it was added in the first place. Was it reducing GPS noise? Was it preventing duplicate events? Was it added because thousands of devices were rapidly entering and exiting the same geofence? Was it a workaround for a production incident that woke up three engineers on a Sunday morning? We may never know. The Archaeology Phase of Software Engineering Every mature codebase eventually turns developers into archaeologists. You discover a mysterious piece of code and begin the sacred ritual: Check Git blame. Open commit. Open PR. Open linked ticket. Ticket references a Slack discussion. Slack link is dead. Original author left the company. Team lead moved to another startup. Nobody remembers anything. Congratulations. You have reached the end of the knowledge graph. The only remaining documentation is a comment that says: // Don't remove this Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Thank you, mysterious engineer from 2023. Very helpful. AI Is About To Make This Much Worse The old workflow looked like this: Human thinks ↓ Human writes code ↓ Human forgets why Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode The new workflow looks like this: Human writes ticket ↓ AI writes code ↓ Human edits code ↓ Another AI refactors code ↓ Reviewer requests changes ↓ Code reaches production ↓ Every