Mitchell tweeted something simple: “I READ CODE…”
And that was it. The internet, Twitter especially, was not ready for such a radical statement.
Every time I hear something like “Claude wrote all of this, I don’t understand how it works,” I draw one conclusion: this person is incapable of debugging, full stop. If you can’t debug code, you don’t really own it. And if you don’t own it, nobody who cares about reliability or stability can trust you as a vendor.
Fair enough, honestly — when production goes down, someone has to be able to debug the problem. “The AI wrote it” isn’t a valid excuse there. Sure, the AI wrote the code — but we’re the ones losing the money.
There’s another position, though: You don’t have to read every line of AI-generated code. But before you push, you should at least skim the diff.
So: read the code, but not all of it — skim the diff and move on.
Which gets you three approaches:
- READ EVERYTHING
- READ SOME OF IT
- DON’T READ IT AT ALL
And three contexts to apply them in:
- PRODUCTION CODE
- PET PROJECT
- MVP / PROTOTYPE
Well, that’s Friday morning well spent — figured it all out! Or did we?