Episode 8: AI generates code. Who carries the understanding?

Vitaly, Anupam, and Maryia sit down with Liliia Abdulina — Head of QA at JetBrains and co-researcher on the BeyondQuality AI-era testing study — who came to this topic the way most useful research starts: with a real problem on her hands. Developers at JetBrains were accelerating with AI, QA was becoming the bottleneck, and she wanted to understand why. The conversation that follows makes the case that this bottleneck isn't new — managers were already complaining "why is testing delaying us" long before AI. What AI did was make a structural problem impossible to ignore. When humans wrote code, understanding came for free: the person who wrote it carried the mental model. Now code is generated at machine speed and nobody carries it. The group calls this cognitive debt — distinct from technical debt, and harder to see. But the subtler casualty is learning. When a tester finds a bug, the developer carries that knowledge forward and writes fewer similar bugs next cycle. Agents don't learn across sessions, so the loop breaks. The industry's response has been to flood the market with AI inspection tools, because inspection is easy to automate. Prevention — which costs less — requires domain understanding that agents don't have, and nobody is building tools for that.Links:1. Lilia's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liliiaabdulina/2. research discussion https://github.com/BeyondQuality/beyondquality/discussions/28 and current artifact https://github.com/BeyondQuality/beyondquality/blob/main/research/ai-era-testing/analysis.md3. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/ten-months-with-cca-in-dotnet-runtime/4. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.22106v2Sponsors:1. Qase https://qase.io/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=beyondquality&utm_campaign=devadvocacy2. Regent https://regent.se3. AnuKrit https://anukrit.de