I’ve seen a few posts recently about how developers will increasingly not even read the code that AI generates for them. Most famously, a blog post from Peter Steinberger:
These days I don’t read much code anymore. I watch the stream and sometimes look at key parts, but I gotta be honest - most code I don’t read.
Peter also posted a photo on Twitter / X that I think is real, although there have been AI-generated joke spin-offs of it, adding more and more monitors. In the real photo, Peter has a ridiculous number of terminal windows open as he juggles many concurrent OpenAI Codex sessions. Extreme multitasking.
I read everything AI helps me with. Sometimes I edit it. It hardly takes any time to skim through code to understand what it’s doing. It would be challenging to design and keep improving an app without having the basic architecture and some of the details in your head.
In a Mastodon thread, Steve Troughton-Smith compared AI-generated code with compiler-generated code:
Much as you don’t generally go auditing the bytecode or intermediate representation generated by your compiler, I think the idea of manually reviewing LLM-written code will fall by the wayside too. Like it or not, these agents are the new compilers, and prompting them is the new programming.
I enjoyed Steve’s posts exploring Xcode 26.3. But compilers are deterministic. When you input C, you can be confident that the machine code it eventually spits out is correct. Decades ago developers might need to drop down to assembly language to optimize something. The compiler is just never going to go off in the weeds and make decisions about the design or structure of your app in the way that LLMs do.
This blog post from Matt Birchler is more my take:
If you don’t know what tech stack you’re using or why things work in the first place, then if things go wrong and the computer isn’t able to fix it for you, then you’re in a sticky situation.
And this is why I think that skilled developers, while they may not be writing every single line of code in the future, they will still bring value by understanding systems.
As I blogged last night, successful developers will now need to focus even more on other aspects of their business. Writing and reviewing code is still going to be part of the job for the foreseeable future.
