Hearing Uncle Bob proclaim reading code as dead makes me feel more than a little sad. After reading Clean Code, I found so much joy in writing beautiful code that I came to love the process even more than whatever end result I happened to be working towards.
Agents have unlocked a new sort of flow for me lately, but I think a part of me will always miss that feeling of writing code by hand and trying to perfect every single last piece of a code base. Honestly I’m just glad I wasn’t around to go from assembly to modern languages because my heart probably couldn’t have taken it 😂
I’m significantly older than you. I started coding in the late 60s. My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents. That’s the only way I can take advantage of their productivity. What I do instead is to surround the agents with extreme constraints. Unit tests, gherkin tests, QA procedures, quality metrics, mutation testing, test coverage, and a plethora of others. In the end, I have very high confidence in the code they produce because they’ve had to run the gauntlet of all of my constraints and tests.