The Sign-Off Layer Is Becoming the Real Engineering System

Let me start with a story: A senior engineer opens a pull request, everything looks good, the tests pass, the description is clean, the diff is a bit long but nothing crazy. There are comments explaining the migration path, a generated test file, and one of those careful little summaries that makes the whole thing feel more understood than it probably is.But then, the PR states, coauthored with Claude Code (or any other harness for that matter). It comes with no surprise nowadays that AI had its claws all over the code, but there’s an interesting question that I think needs answering. Who is truly responsible for the changes? Is there a human being who’s willing to say they understand the change well enough to own it when it breaks, defend it in review, explain it during an incident, and accept the consequences of having let it into the system?That is the part of AI-assisted engineering that still feels under-discussed to me. We spend a lot of time talking about the generation layer.…