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Stop Reading the Code
An agent just wrote three hundred lines in forty seconds. You open the diff, start reading line by line, and somewhere around line ninety your eyes glaze over. By the time you finish, you could have written half of it yourself. So what exactly did the agent buy you?
Robert Martin, the man who spent decades teaching a generation to care about every line, has a blunt answer. He says he does not read the code his agents write. He calls this the only way to actually capture the productivity of an agent. Coming from the author of Clean Code, that sounds like heresy. It is not. It is the logical end of an argument he has been making his whole career, just pointed at a new bottleneck.
The bottleneck moved
Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic. A capable agent generates code far faster than any human can read it, let alone review it with real attention. If your workflow requires a human to read every line before it ships, then your throughput is permanently capped at human reading speed. The agent is now a very expensive way to feel busy.
Think of it like the shift from hand tools to a CNC machine. A master woodworker inspects every cut by hand because their hands made the cut. A machine shop does not work that way. Nobody eyeballs each pass of the mill. They set tolerances, then they measure the finished part against those…
