> The role of the human engineer […] has been to reduce risk in the face of ambiguity, constraints, and change. That responsibility not only endures in a world of Write-Only Code, if anything it expands.

> The next generation of software engineering excellence will be defined not by how well we review the code we ship, but by how well we design systems that remain correct, resilient, and accountable even when no human ever reads the code that runs in production.

As a mechanical engineer, I have learned how to design systems that meet your needs. Many tools are used in this process that you cannot audit by yourself. The industry has evolved to the point that there are many checks at every level, backed by standards, governing bodies, third parties, and so on. Trust is a major ingredient, but it is institutionalized. Our entire profession relies on the laws of physics and mathematics. In other words, we have a deterministic system where every step is understood and cast into trust in one way or another. The journey began with the Industrial Revolution and is never-ending; we are always learning and improving.

Given what I have learned and read about LLM-based technology, I don't think it's fit for the purpose you describe as a future goal. Technology breakthroughs will be evaluated retrospectively, and we are in the very early stages right now. Let's evaluate again in 20 years, but I doubt that "write-only code" without human understanding is the way forward for our civilization.

Would I use a write-only HTML sanitizer for untrusted HTML: No!

Would I care to review CSS, if my site "looks" good? No!

The challenge becomes: how can we enforce invariants/abstractions etc without inspecting the code.

Type systems, model checking, static analysis. Could become new power tools.

But sound design probably still goes far.