Reading through this reminds me of how bot farms will regularly consist of stripped down phones that are essentially just the mainboard hooked up to a controller that simulates the externals.

When struggling with failing to reverse engineer mobile apps for smart home devices, I’ve considered trying to set something like this up for a single device.

I used to do this! I can’t anymore, not with the advent of AI coding agents.

My trust in my colleagues is gone, I have no reason to believe they wrote the code they asked me to put my approval on, and so I certainly don’t want to be on a postmortem being asked why I approved the change.

Perhaps if I worked in a different industry I would feel like you do, but payments is a scary place to cause downtime.