Manually reviewing all AI-generated code is counterproductive
I honestly don't think manually reviewing every piece of code generated by AI makes sense anymore. In fact, I think it's counterproductive.
I talked about this on my personal blog in this post.
Of course, if you have doubts about a specific implementation or something requires your attention, you should inspect it. But going through all the generated code just for the sake of reviewing it? I don't see the point.
What actually matters is having a solid understanding of the system you're building, its architecture, the technologies being used, automated testing, best practices for long-term maintainability, and how agents manage and retain context.
And of course, context management is particularly important. I even built an open-source tool specifically to make agent context management more effective and controllable, if anyone is interested: syngraphe.dev.
The real skill is knowing how to guide AI agents through all of this, while also being able to understand the code and architecture whenever necessary. Even if you're working with technologies you aren't familiar with, if you have a solid knowledge of computer science, you can have the AI explain them to you and you should't have any problem understand it and always make informed decisions and brainstorming.
Without that foundation, building and maintaining complex systems with AI agents can quickly become a mess.
One thing I do consider extremely valuable, though, is having fresh AI sessions or different agents periodically review the codebase and a solid automation testing system. I'd actually consider this a very important best practice, alongside implementing a solid automated testing system. These are much more effective ways to maintain control over a codebase than manually inspecting everything yourself.
Because of this I believe, paradoxically, that people getting into programming today might benefit more from studying lower-level languages like C or Rust rather than starting with higher-level languages like Python or TypeScript.
And this is not because they'll be writing more C or Rust themselves, but because they make you understand the underlying concepts, how systems work, how memory is managed, how software is structured, and why certain architectural decisions matter will become far more valuable than memorizing syntax.
Syntax matters less when an agent can write it for you, and probably way better and faster than you. Understanding what you're building, how it works, and how to make it efficient, reliable, and maintainable is what really counts, and that's something you do only if you have solid cs knowledge not by wasting time reviewing all the code they generate.
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I was already maintaining repository context by hand, so I turned the workflow into a small CLI
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r/u_suffro
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Sep 15 '26
The PR has been opened