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1020: Do You Read The Code?
Where this was said
Do you read the code?
At 15:11 · chapter starts 3:21
A single tweet asking 'how much better do the models have to get before you stop reading the code?' exploded across developer Twitter, drawing responses from Minecraft creator Notch, Primeagen, Theo, Dax, David Fowler, Rich Harris, and Sentry co-founder David Cramer. CJ didn't even know who Notch was — a fact Scott found shocking given Minecraft's permanent residency in his household. Cramer's take is the one that resonates most: 'No good engineer will tell you reading the code is useless.' [1] — CJ Reynolds "No good engineer will tell you it's useless to read the code, by the way. That's the easiest signal. I think like it's part of our jobs." 06:39 Scott and CJ both converge on a situational answer — read production code, let throwaway scripts slide — but CJ makes the deeper point: when you stop reading, you stop building a mental model of your codebase, which erodes the core value of having a human engineer in the loop at all [2] — CJ Reynolds "If really we don't have to read the code anymore, like show me the receipts. Like, are you actually making money from it? Are you actually …" 11:58 . David Fowler's point about software being a multiplayer game rounds things out: nobody is talking seriously about what engineering *teams* look like in an agent-first world.
Auto-accept on, brain off? The answer depends on what you're building. For production code, skipping code review means losing the mental model of your codebase entirely — and that erodes the core value of having an engineer in the loop.
