Accountability Lost: How AI Revives the 'Steve Wrote It' Problem

As AI becomes ubiquitous in software development, 'AI wrote it' threatens to become the new escape hatch for accountability—just as 'Steve wrote it' once was. This exploration reveals how displaced responsibility creates identical patterns of technical debt and deferred costs, regardless of whether code is attributed to a departed engineer or an algorithm. Understanding this cycle is crucial for developers who must break the pattern and recognize that architectural decisions always carry real consequences that eventually land on someone's desk.