I've been thinking more about the this reply and I think I figured it out. > how did you trust it before when humans wrote it? you mostly didn't, not really. you trusted the tests, the fact that it was already in production somewhere similar, the author's track record, and the reality that most of the time the bug would show up in monitoring before it became a real problem. the diff was honestly a ritual more than a guarantee. we pretended like line-level review was a safety net because we didn't have better options and the volume was low enough that it felt manageable. but agents just make the old ritual obvious. once you're landing thousands of changes a month the idea that someone is carefully reading every diff starts being theater. trusting agent output is the same problem as trusting human output, just with higher throughput. I think the answer is still to stop treating the change as the thing you trust and start treating the environment as the thing you trust. if an agent can run the code, drive the ui, check the invariants, and get blocked by the same constraints a human would, the fact that it wrote the patch matters less. every time you find yourself wanting to open the diff "just to make sure," that's signal that something in the system is still relying on human eyeballs instead of a hard constraint. the code review as we know it is already on the way out. most of what we call review today will turn into risk scoring and continuous verification. low and medium risk work will land after agents and checks have already exercised it. humans will still be involved, but not by reading patches. they'll just be deciding what outcomes matter, whats not allowed to break, and which constraints are worth making permanent. the job now is to continuously make the system good enough that you don't need the diff to feel safe.

China is crazy. You could quit big tech, move into a dilapidated leaky Chengdu rooftop shack, train AI models as a freelancer, and still end up doing food delivery at night just to make rent.