[groos]

As I am continually amazed at how well Claude 4.7 deals with highly complicated C++ code, I am also becoming painfully aware of the developing situation mentioned in this article: I no longer completely understand the code it is editing, not because I'm incapable of doing it, but because I have not authored the changes. I am trading throughput for understanding, and, eventually, judgment.

[lowbloodsugar]

That’s entirely on you. You can take the time to understand it before moving on to the next task. I say this with sympathy and understanding.

[groos]

You missed the point - understanding comes from working through the code, not just reading it. This is nothing new: nobody has learned or done new mathematics or physics or whatever by just reading a textbook.

[lowbloodsugar]

Sure. But it’s a lot easier to learn nonlinear mathematics or quantum theory with a textbook than without. In this case you’re not learning about “what is a for loop”. You’re learning “why a OnceLock here rather than a RwLock”.

Many of us work on teams so we already have to deal with the majority of code being written by someone else. I’ve got code that’s more than a decade old, written by people I’ve never met.

[groos]

Again, note that I said "work through" and not "read". Reading code is shallow. Debugging it, modifying it, inserting diagnostic code, etc. is not.

[danaw]

nail on the head. the loss in understanding, learning and context is often not worth the increase in volume of output