Disagree on the slop point. By now the code of frontier models works well, and the need to read it is gone. The Claude word salad problem was pretty much solved with the 5.5 opus release.
The other 3 points made in article make sense though.
The other 3 points made in article make sense though.
Like anything else, it depends on what you're working on. For small personal projects I agree, but in maintaining large scale business applications with millions of lines of code, I am still having to guide the models to reuse existing code and to be more flexible with their data structures to accommodate changing business requirements in the future.
They only see a snapshot of the world the application exists in due to their ephemeral nature, and until that is overcome, they will only be able to learn general principles and not the particular nuances of your codebase that only arise from observing how the users use it on a daily basis.
That said, I think we need to be prepared for how a simple prompt like "make it faster" will work in a relatively short timeframe - and where the AI is able to adequately refactor/re-platform/be done in a way where even the architecture becomes obscure to us.
Perhaps I could set up a workflow to handle this without reading the code. I’ve seen people who make Claude fill out arcane templates, and then spend their time reviewing reports and tinkering with loops or whatever. But why would I want to read a TPS report about the code rather than just reading the code?
How about, no thanks, I’ll go to a real restaurant.
AI build me a cost overview of xyz: works perfectly without ever looking at the code
AI build me unreal engine 5 level graphics, or a database, or infra at high scale: this will need some active steering for now :)