AI Code Generation Trades Writing for Reading
In this short take, the author argues that AI code generation doesn’t actually save much time. If you have to painstakingly review and debug every line, you’ve just traded writing time for reading time. The real win, they argue, would come from verification: AI that can prove its output is correct, so you don’t have to read it at all.
What I like about this framing is the shift in where the difficulty actually sits. For decades, the hardest part of being a programmer was writing the software in the first place. In the age of agentic coding, that has flipped: the hardest part is reading code you didn’t write and deciding whether to trust it. And careful reading, with all the hidden assumptions and trade-offs that aren’t obvious until you’ve sat with them, can genuinely be harder than writing the thing from scratch.