Since the November/December Opus and Claude Code, I found I don't need to read the code any more. Architecture overview sure, and testing yes, but not reading the code directly any more.

Me (and my friends similarly) inspect code indirectly now - telling agents to write reports about certain aspects of the code and architecture etc.

I do regularly read the code that Claude outputs. And about 25% of the time the tests it writes will reimplement the code under test in the test.

Another 25% of the time the tests are wrong in some other way. Usually mocking something in a way that doesn't match reality.

And maybe 5% of the time Claude does some testing that requires a database, it will find some other database lying around and try to use that instead of what it's supposed to be doing.

And even if Claude writes a correct test, it will general have it skip the test if a dependency isn't there--no matter how fervently I tell it not to.

If you're not looking the code at all, you're building a house of cards. If you not reading the tests you're not even building you're just covering the floor in a big sloppy pile of runny shit.

I'd understand not reading the code of the system under test, but you don't even read the tests? I'd do that if my architecture and design were very precise, but at this point I'd have spent too much time designing rather than implementing (and possibly uncovering unknown unknowns in the process).

> Me (and my friends similarly) inspect code indirectly now - telling agents to write reports about certain aspects of the code and architecture etc.

Doesn't this take longer than reading the code?

I can see how some of this is part of the future (I remember this article talking about python modules having a big docstring at the top fully describing the public functions, and the author describing how they just update this doc, then regenerate the code fully, never reading it, and I find this quite convincing), but in the end I just want the most concise language for what I'm trying to express. If I need an edge case covered, I'd rather have a very simple test making that explicit than more verbose forms. Until we have formal specifications everywhere I guess.

But maybe I'm just not picturing what you mean exactly by "reports".

If I were you I’d very worried about getting laid off. That kind of work isn’t going to keep earning a software engineer salary.

I've seen the code these models produce without a human programmer going over the results with care. It's still slop. Better slop than in the past, but slop none the less. If you aren't at minimum reading the code yourself and you're shipping a significant amount of it, you're either effectively the first person to figure out the magic prompt to get the models to produce better code, or you're shipping slop. Personally, I wouldn't bet on the former.