Claude can write the code for you but it can’t understand it for you. That part has to happen at human speeds.
There are cases where you don’t have to understand everything, but I think that’s a more nuanced question.
All of the above is true even if Claude writes perfect code.
Part of the problem is that Claude can go spelunking in a spaghetti codebase far faster than us humans. It doesn't necessarily help you understand the project, but if you farm that understanding out to Claude, you can keep working long after the codebase has become unusable for humans...
It's an interesting point. We can also think about it perhaps as a non binary thing - you need X amount of understanding in a specific codebase to be effective. Even before LLMs in large codebases no one understood it all; but we at least mostly understood our own PRs and our own areas of expertise in the codebase.
A lot of the time people flailed.
The one thing Ive never seen an LLM do well is shape clean, coherent abstractions. To be fair it's a rare human skill as well but in LLMs if they don't have a direct analog in their training data they flail.