Authorship Anxiety

ELI5 - The Vibe Check

You wrote the ticket. You wrote the prompt. You approved every change. But somewhere around line 400 of a file the agent generated in one pass, you stop being able to say with a straight face that you wrote this code. Authorship anxiety is the low-grade unease of not being entirely sure how much of 'your' work is actually yours.

Real Talk

Authorship anxiety is the discomfort developers report around claiming ownership of code that was substantially generated by an AI agent, even when they directed, reviewed, and approved it. It surfaces in performance reviews, portfolio conversations, and interviews, where 'I built this' has become a genuinely harder sentence to say with full confidence than it used to be.

When You'll Hear This

"I have real authorship anxiety putting this project on my resume, the agent wrote most of it." / "Try not to let authorship anxiety stop you from taking credit for the parts you actually designed."