People don’t typically have to approve and submit their super’s work IME so I’m curious what you mean. If they write you unclear slop emails then constantly bother them for clarification until they fix it.

In startups it's extremely common to have management still write code. Hell I'm CTO and I write a lot of code.

I know there can be CTOs who write a lot of code and be good, but I hope to God you're not my CTO because he is a nightmare in this regard right now. We aren't even a startup anymore we have 80 engineers and he pushed 200k lines this week

Whoa, 200k lines is a lot. Without knowing the details I wouldn't want to pass judgment, but that would be a flag to say the least. I don't know how he is reading all that code before pushing...

There's a danger in it too because (whether it should or not) CTO title carries a level of weight that might result in less scrutiny than an IC (which it should not IMHO). I hope he is encouraging objective reviews and not pushing stuff through on his title.

Ah so this was a more narrow example than I initially read it as.

In that case I guess you just keep pressing them to document/make notes. Keep asking questions. Basically take away their “saved time” by dumping the time sink they dumped on you back on them.

I get my team to review my code, AI generated or not. Goes through the same process as anything they produce. Two pairs of eyeballs on everything.