> Here’s the thing: I don’t read code anymore. I used to write code and read code. Now when something isn’t working, I don’t go look at the code.

Recently I picked a smallish task from our backlog. This is some code I'm not familiar with, frontend stuff I wouldn't tackle normally.

Claude wrote something. I tested, it didn't work. I explained the issue. It added a bunch of traces, asked me to collect the logs, figured out a fix, submitted the change.

Got bunch of linter errors that I don't understand, and that I copied and pasted to Claude. It fixed something, but still got lint errors, which Claude dismissed as irrelevant, but I realized I wasn't happy with the new behavior.

After 3 days of iteration, my change seems ok, passed the CI, the linters, and automatic review.

At that stage, I have no idea if this is the right way to fix the problem, and if it breaks something, I won't be able to fix it myself as I'm clueless. Also, it could be that a human reviewer tells me it's totally wrong, or ask me questions I won't be able to answer.

Not only, this process wasn't fun at all, but I also didn't learn anything, and I may introduce technical debt which AI may not be able to fix.

I agree that coding agents can boost efficiency in some cases, but I don't see a shift left of IDEs at that stage.

This has largely been my experience. Just reading and understanding the code, and writing the change myself ends up actually being faster.

My rule is 3 tries then dig deeper. Sometimes I don't even wait that long, certain classes of bugs are easy for humans to detect but hard for agents, such as CSS issues. Try asking the agent to explain/summarize the code that's causing the problem and double checking against docs for the version you're using, that solves a lot of problems.

Why not look at the code? If you see something that looks messy, ask for it to be cleaned up.

Code health is a choice. We have power tools now. All you have to do is ask.