You Can Generate Faster Than You Can Read

The bottleneck moved. For years the slow part was typing. Now four hundred lines arrive in nine seconds, and the slow part is you, reading them. We have not adjusted. We still measure a good day by how much appeared. But nothing counts until somebody understands it, and understanding did not get faster. So the pile grows. Code that runs. Code that passes. Code nobody has actually read. It works the way a stranger's directions work. Fine until the first turn you did not expect. Then you are debugging something you never wrote, in a shape you did not choose, at an hour you did not pick. The honest limit is simple. Do not accept more than you can review. Not more than you can skim. More than you can review, meaning you could defend every decision in it to someone who disagrees. If that takes an hour, then an hour is your budget, whatever the machine can produce. So ask for less. One function, not one module. One change, not one feature. A first draft you can argue with, rather than a finished thing you are tempted to trust because it is long and it is tidy. Tidy is not correct. It never was. The machine is simply better at looking finished than we ever were. Read it the way you would if a contractor handed you the keys and left the country. Because that is the arrangement. It will not be there when it fails. You will. There is a quiet cost, too. Every line you accepted without reading is a line you cannot reason about once the incident starts, and the incident does not care who typed it. The old skill was producing. The new skill is refusing. Not this. Not yet. Not in that shape. Generation is cheap now. Attention is not, and attention was always the whole of the job. Slow down at the only step that ever mattered. – Serguey Asael Shinder