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Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

I actually dispute this, I read all the code, the core thing people have to give up is not "reading the code" per se, it's giving up on "that's not how I would have done it".

When you see a perfectly clear function or object that just isn't your style, you have to accept it and move on. Where there are concrete concerns, or it's unreadable, demand excellence, but treat it like a coworker, not an IDE.

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This all reminds me of the differing experiences people had outsourcing coding in the 2010s when it was still called oDesk. You don’t need to read code, you just need to know that the code works. If something doesn’t show up as a problem it doesn’t need to be fixed, and reading code is the least efficient way to discover problems.

The only time I look at code is when something isn’t right and I ask for a root cause analysis. The LLM will show me some offending code or code for reference or evidence and then I quite often say “well that’s dumb you should do it like this instead” but I never need to actually go into the files. I do sometimes look at a git status or git diff.

Yeah this is how I feel about it. Does it look correct? is it doing something weird? Is it forgetting about some gotcha in our domain that it hasn't been taught about yet? Otherwise, ship it.

> When you see a perfectly clear function or object that just isn't your style

is the critical caveat to “that’s not how I would have done it”. Basically, choose your battles because we all have limited bandwidth. So, it’s not really a perfect binary, but a taste that you personally develop.

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