>> The entire software development lifecycle was, it turns out, designed around the idea that it takes a day to produce a few hundred lines of code.

Yeah. I'm not sure how other people work, but I almost never need to write formal tests because I essentially test locally as I write, one method at a time, and at that moment I have a complete mental map of everything that can potentially go wrong with a piece of code. I write and test constantly in tandem. I can write a test afterwards to prove what I already know, but I already know it. This is time consuming, anal, and obsessive-compulsive, and luckily that kind of work perfectly suits my personality. The end result is perfect before I commit it.

It is a lot of fun asking LLMs to write code around my code. Make 10 charts with chartjs in an html page that show something and put it behind a reverse proxy so the client can see it. Wow. Spot on, would've taken me an hour. I can even rely on Claude to somewhat honestly reason about things in personal projects.

But knowing every implementation decision makes a huge difference when anything real is at stake. "Guilt" wouldn't begin to describe the sense I'd have id my software did something because of a piece of code I hadn't personally reviewed and fully understood, at which point I probably should have just written it myself.