Treat generated code as a draft from an unfamiliar contributor: fast, useful, and held to exactly the same review standard as anything else. Be explicit about where it is encouraged (boilerplate, tests, unfamiliar syntax, exploration) and where it needs extra scrutiny (security sensitive paths, licensing, anything the author cannot explain). Watch review load closely, because the bottleneck moves from writing code to reviewing it.
Why interviewers ask this
This is a current reality check. Interviewers want a manager with a considered position rather than a ban or a free for all: clear expectations, unchanged accountability for whatever gets merged, awareness of security and licensing concerns, and attention to the second order effects on review capacity and on how juniors build judgment. Blanket enthusiasm and blanket refusal both read as unthinking.
How to structure your answer
- State the accountability principle: the author owns the merged code.
- Say where you encourage it and where you add scrutiny.
- Address the review bottleneck it creates.
- Cover what it means for how juniors develop judgment.
Example answer
My rule is simple: whoever opens the pull request owns every line in it, and if you cannot explain why it works in review, it does not merge. That one principle handles most of the risk without me writing a policy nobody reads. I actively encourage it for the boring bulk, test scaffolding, migrations, unfamiliar library syntax, and for exploring an approach quickly. I ask for more care on security sensitive paths and anything touching licensing, and we do not paste customer data into external tools. The effect I watch hardest is review load. Output rose noticeably on my team and review became the constraint almost immediately, so we set the expectation that a large generated diff arrives with the author's own summary of what to look at, and we push back on enormous unfocused pull requests much more aggressively than we used to. The other thing I watch is juniors, because you can now produce working code without understanding it, so in one to ones I ask them to walk me through their reasoning more than I once did.
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See how it worksFollow-up questions to expect
- How would you handle an engineer who cannot explain their own pull request?
- Has it changed how you interview candidates?
- How do you measure whether it is actually making the team faster?
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