At what point do we really not read code itself anymore? Have Sonnet/Opus write the code, work with the agents on a high level, then have Fable code review and its done.

Any bugs found are looped through agents to fix, and the cycle repeats. Why dig into the code unless for hobby? Just as people don’t write assembly anymore unless for hobby (or learning)

Only exception might be the upper echelons of optimization, like language authors or compiler level work. But even then…

I think it very much depends on what you're working on, and how much you're responsible. For a web front end, not really. A backend where a single line can make a mess out of your data? Yes. Part of the issue too, is code review brings up things you the prompter didn't think about that another teammate may be thinking about. The value goes beyond making sure the code is "correct", but also that it makes sense in your domain.

The "we don't read/write assembly anymore" argument doesn't fit though. Given an input x we know without a doubt we'll get output y. With an LLM, that isn't the case no matter how many guard rails, specs, markdown files, diagrams you give it.

I stopped reading the code many months ago, probably 18 months ago. I the "early" days of agentic coding one did feel dumb when telling the agent for the 30th time to fix a bug and it just couldn't. Now I cannot possibly imagine a scenario where an agent wouldn't be able to fix a given issue on 1st or 2nd try.