I came across an interesting ethical conundrum at work recently. The following is like a Bac de Philo, the famous philosophy essay for the French school degree. You have four hours, discuss.
Team A maintains a proprietary domain-specific language (DSL) that is widely used inside the company. It is used both during builds and at runtime. Its slowness and high memory usage shows up in profiling as a bottleneck.
Team B is probably the biggest user of this DSL. A senior engineer on team B has vibe-coded an alternative interpreter for this DSL, from scratch, within a few days. They have not read the code. Because this interpreter’s design is specific to one task (evaluating this DSL), it is 10x faster than the existing interpreter.
The engineer on team B wants to replace the old interpreter to save a ton of time and compute resources. They have run both interpreters on all the files that they know of and verified that they produce identical output. On the other hand, they don’t want to maintain this interpreter forever – that’s the job of team A. They go to team A and propose that they should take on the new codebase and replace their existing codebase with it.
- As the tech lead of team A, would you accept the offer? Why or why not?
- As the tech lead of team B (not the implementer), what would you do? Would you participate in the negotiations? Would you put pressure on team A? Would you escalate?
- As a senior lead (say Vice President), with both teams reporting to you indirectly, would you intervene? If so, how?
- If your answer to any of the above hinges on the fact that the code was written by AI: would your answers change if it was not? If the engineer had spent the weekend in a retreat and coded the whole thing by hand? What if it was in Haskell?