--- title: On Accountability | daily.dev description: A software testing researcher reflects on accountability in software engineering, inspired by a keynote at ICST 2024. The piece argues that the tech industry... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/on-accountability-hlm0vqgnc twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: On Accountability | daily.dev og:description: A software testing researcher reflects on accountability in software engineering, inspired by a keynote at ICST 2024. The piece argues that the tech industry... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/on-accountability-hlm0vqgnc og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/HLm0vQgnc.png og:image:alt: On Accountability og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # On Accountability **[Lobsters](https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters)** · 6 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A software testing researcher reflects on accountability in software engineering, inspired by a keynote at ICST 2024. The piece argues that the tech industry has long avoided responsibility for the software it ships, and that the rise of LLMs is accelerating this trend by disconnecting developers from the code they produce. As AI tools increase code output while reducing individual ownership and understanding, the author warns that accountability will erode further — with developers becoming scapegoats while systemic failures go unaddressed. The post calls for real, enforceable accountability for companies that distribute software people depend on. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 8 comments across lobsters, hackernews (as of 2026-07-25). **TL;DR:** The Lobsters community broadly agrees that software lacks the accountability of traditional engineering, but debates whether regulation, ethics education, or product liability law is the right lever — with some skepticism that regulation is a silver bullet. **Sentiment:** 30% positive · 40% mixed · 30% skeptical **The case for** - Extending undisclaimable product liability laws to large, profitable software companies could meaningfully change industry incentives. - Traditional engineering fields demonstrate that effective regulation does reduce major failures over time. - Whistleblower protections in a lightly regulated software industry could give individual contributors real leverage against management-imposed negligence. **The pushback** - Harm from software failures is far less clear-cut than physical injury or property damage, making accountability harder to assign. - Ethics courses for individual contributors won't overcome what management can easily impose without structural regulatory threats. - Regulation's effectiveness is highly contextual and not guaranteed to translate from civil/automotive engineering to software. **By community** - lobsters (mixed): Commenters agree accountability is lacking but are divided on whether regulation, liability law, or ethics education is the right fix, with some skepticism about regulation being universally effective. - hackernews (mixed): No comments were present, so no signal is available from this source. **Hottest debate:** Whether extending product liability law to large software companies is the right mechanism versus relying on regulation or professional ethics education. **Open questions** - How should 'harm' from software failures be defined and measured in a way courts and regulators can act on? - Would product liability thresholds based on company size or revenue be enforceable without massive lobbying defeating them? - Is there a non-regulatory mechanism (like EuroNCAP-style voluntary standards) that could raise software accountability without legislation? **Highlights** > An engineer in a field regulated even lightly, whistleblowing the level of reliability indifference found in large for-profit software development companies, could probably get the company fined a fraction of its worth that would really be felt. Without that implicit threat, teaching ethics courses to individual contributors won't remove the things that management can easily impose. Copyright licenses allowing to disclaim liability for software make sense for non-profit development and small companies, but not for software companies that got large. Right now they have the best combo: they get to abuse regulations (e.g. buying anti-circumvention laws), not subject to any effective regulation of their practices (maybe sometimes for some especially egregious monopoly abuse EU will fine someone), _and_ are allowed to disclaim product liability. I think just extending the undisclaimable product liability laws to software sold or rented or operated for profit after passing through hands of a company with more than 1000 employees or more than 100 million in revenue or more than 1 billion in funds would change a lot of things. Of course, there is _a lot_ of lobbying money to prevent this. > — [k749gtnc9l3w on lobsters · 7 points](https://lobste.rs/s/mwelmm/on_accountability#c_juwjmg) > As someone who went to undergrad for a "traditional engineering" (civil), and took multiple ethics classes as part of the curriculum, I am keenly aware of the chasm between software engineering and these other fields. > When something causes harm in the traditional engineering domains, the company faces severe penalties, and a proper investigation is done to determine the cause of the failure. One issue here is that its a lot more cut and dry in "traditional engineering domains" when something causes harm: people either are directly injured/killed, or large amounts of personal property are damaged in the best case. This is why these fields require licensure, so that someone's directly responsible for these decisions. We can all wish that people viewed code quality and the industry side effects as more of "someone's fault", but its just not as clear to a lot of people. > — [samcat116 on lobsters · 12 points, 2 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/mwelmm/on_accountability#c_ddzo5r) > I originally published this a week and a half ago, before we knew that OpenAI hacked HuggingFace. I figured it'd be worthwhile to share [following my comment on the matter](https://lobste.rs/c/5fjwdr), as this really is part and parcel with my central claim: we need greater accountability for negligence and bad practices in software development. > — [addison on lobsters · 8 points](https://lobste.rs/s/mwelmm/on_accountability#c_bcssqc) **Source threads** - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/mwelmm/on_accountability) · 21 points · 8 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49040334) · 1 points · 0 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The AI coding hangover](https://daily.dev/posts/the-ai-coding-hangover-5hylutrto) · InfoWorld · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Engineering Is Not Dead Because Accountability Isn't](https://daily.dev/posts/engineering-is-not-dead-because-accountability-isn-t-sofif5tu2) · RUBYLAND · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Will you go to prison for an AI?](https://daily.dev/posts/will-you-go-to-prison-for-an-ai--pheo5pflo) · ploeh blog · 12 upvotes · 3 comments --- Tags: [#testing](https://daily.dev/tags/testing), [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/on-accountability-hlm0vqgnc) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"On Accountability","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/on-accountability-hlm0vqgnc","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/on-accountability-hlm0vqgnc"},"datePublished":"2026-07-24T19:50:42.412Z","dateModified":"2026-07-25T00:13:24.646Z","description":"A software testing researcher reflects on accountability in software engineering, inspired by a keynote at ICST 2024. 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