u/vomor_hudiskco

I have been seeing a lot of PRs lately where the middleware is clearly 100% AI-generated, and when you ask the dev Why is this specific check happening here? or How is this handling the request-response lifecycle?,

most of them get a blank stare.

Look, I get it. are we all trying to move faster, and tools like blackbox AI or cursor are amazing for knocking out boilerplate or complex logic in seconds. but middleware is the high-stakes territory of your app. Whether it's handling auth, logging, or custom headers, this is the layer where things can fail silently and catastrophically.

If you are just vibe-checking the code and hitting merge because the terminal didn't scream at you, you arre basically planting a landmine for your future self (or your teammates).

my rule of thumb: If you can't explain the logic behind an AI-generated middleware block to a junior dev, it shouldn't be in production. We are supposed to be using these tools to augment our engineering, not to outsource our understanding of the core architecture.

are we becoming Prompt Engineers at the expense of actually knowing how our systems work, or am I just being a gatekeeping dinosaur?

how are you guys handling AI-generated logic in your code reviews?

Are you forcing people to walk through the logic, or just trusting the output if the tests pass?

I have been seeing a lot of PRs lately where the middleware is clearly 100% AI-generated, and when you ask the dev Why is this specific check happening here? or How is this handling the request-response lifecycle?,

most of them get a blank stare.

Look, I get it. are we all trying to move faster, and tools like blackbox AI or cursor are amazing for knocking out boilerplate or complex logic in seconds. but middleware is the high-stakes territory of your app. Whether it's handling auth, logging, or custom headers, this is the layer where things can fail silently and catastrophically.

If you are just vibe-checking the code and hitting merge because the terminal didn't scream at you, you arre basically planting a landmine for your future self (or your teammates).

my rule of thumb: If you can't explain the logic behind an AI-generated middleware block to a junior dev, it shouldn't be in production. We are supposed to be using these tools to augment our engineering, not to outsource our understanding of the core architecture.

are we becoming Prompt Engineers at the expense of actually knowing how our systems work, or am I just being a gatekeeping dinosaur?

how are you guys handling AI-generated logic in your code reviews?

Are you forcing people to walk through the logic, or just trusting the output if the tests pass?