The first time I switched on adaptive cruise control on Outer Ring Road, my left foot was hovering over a clutch pedal that didn’t exist.
That is the exact mental state every verification engineer is walking into right now with AI.
The manual years:
Years of driving a manual car through Bangalore traffic does something strange. Your body learns the city. Eyes track the auto’s front-wheel angle without thinking. The right foot reads the gap to the next car in centimetres. The left leg knows the clutch bite point in second gear.
And while all that is happening, my mind is calm. The chaos of Silk Board is being handled by a part of me that doesn’t need supervision.
Switching to ACC:
The ADAS car does the opposite.
My body is relaxed. No clutch, no constant brake-feathering. But my mind has never been more stressed. Is the ACC seeing that auto cutting in? Why did it accelerate just now? When exactly do I override? My foot hovers over a pedal I haven’t pressed in twenty minutes but cannot be late on.
The body is comfortable. The mind never sits down.
This is exactly what AI does to a verification engineer. Your hands are relaxed — you didn’t write the 2000 lines of UVM scaffolding. But your mind is in permanent audit. Did it understand the requirement? When do I override?
The work hasn’t reduced. It’s relocated. From the fingertips to the forebrain.
Whose name is on the FIR:
Why is the mind so stressed in the first place?
When my ADAS car rear-ends an auto on Hosur Road, the FIR is not filed against the car company. The system was steering, accelerating, and braking. But I am the one driving.
That’s why the mind doesn’t get to relax. The cognitive load isn’t a side-effect of new technology. It is the correct response to where responsibility actually lives.
Verification is the same:
When silicon comes back and a corner-case escape brings down a customer’s board, no post-mortem says “the AI generated that testbench.” It says the engineer signed off. There is no model card on the bug report.
The AI is the ACC. You are the driver.
The check-in is your brake pedal:
One message to every verification engineer reading this:
Override in the car means a foot on the brake. Override in verification means the review before check-in.
AI-generated code review is the new core skill. It is not the same as reviewing a junior engineer’s work. Juniors write code that is wrong in learnable ways. AI writes code that is wrong in plausible ways — clean syntax, sensible naming, structure that mirrors every textbook example. The errors hide in intent, not form.
AI-generated code can compile cleanly, simulate cleanly, lint cleanly, and still be subtly wrong. The reviewer is the last barrier between plausible and correct.
Nothing the AI produces should reach the repo before a human has actually understood it. Not skimmed. Understood.