Quoting More than just code review

Quoting Simon Willison's More than just code review (via)

Sometimes this involves reviewing every line of code they have written, but there are other ways to achieve that goal. Eyeballing every line of code has never been the most effective way to validate a change to a piece of software.

I keep coming back to the idea that eyeballing was never really the point. The need to fully understand the code has always been there, coding agents haven't changed that. What they do change is how fast code gets written, which makes it easy to forget that the architecture (what to build and how to build it) is still controlled by the humans in the project.

When the people involved share the same long term vision of how the project should evolve and what approaches solve specific problems, code changes become shallow and mechanical. Reviewing them turns into checking that each piece lands in the right position. That only works if the mental model is genuinely shared, written down somewhere real, an architecture note with the module boundaries, the vocabulary of solutions used across spec documents and the decisions behind them. And the project has to lean hard on automated checks so vibe coding doesn't degrade into just being careless.

The more boring and automatic those gates are, the better: tests, type checks, linters, contract tests at the boundaries, all running on every commit without anyone having to ask. The machine does most of the line-by-line validation, and the freed review time goes to the part that still needs a human: checking that the change fits the shape of the system, not just whether it works.