[esperent]

I never said you wouldn't have to read code. I was asking a question to get answers about how people would achieve having an oversight if it was humans writing code that they were managing rather than agents.

As for your suggestion, understanding every line might have worked in the 70s but even pre-agentic modern coding it's not possible for any large project with dependencies even if you are directly contributing code yourself, so I'm not sure how useful your idea is.

There's definitely cases where you should have that aim - writing a low level maths or graphics library, for example. But most people are not doing that.

[et1337]

Perhaps my "reject the premise" comment was a bit too provocative. I didn't intend to start an argument. I wanted to share a story of a person who was put in the position you described (working as a manager on a large project, required to have an overview of the project but not necessarily to actually write or review much code), failed miserably, changed the rules of engagement (partly by reviewing code), and subsequently succeeded. So my _personal_ answer to your question of how to build a mental model in that scenario would be to do something in the same vein as that story. Not necessarily _exactly_ what that guy did, but I think the principles still apply today. Nothing really changes.