Simon Willison's point underscores a looming cultural shift in software development, where the premium moves from writing code to curating and validating it. In our view, this risks creating a new class of subtle, systemic errors if verification becomes a high-level, conceptual exercise rather than a detailed inspection. The industry may be trading the known devil of human error for the unknown devil of AI-generated logical drift, where mistakes are coherent and thus harder to catch. The essential skill, then, might not just be verification, but developing a skepticism tuned to the specific failure modes of generative AI.
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Simon Willison says code review is not the only way to verify AI agent work
A developer argues that validating AI-generated code changes requires more than line-by-line scrutiny, a skill becoming essential for productivity.
AIpressr commentary on an article originally published by Simon Willison.
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Read the original article at simonwillison.net →Source: Simon Willison, simonwillison.net — Aug 22, 2026
“The key skill required to make productive use of coding agents is being able to confidently instruct them on how to make changes and then confidently verify that those changes have been applied in the correct way.”
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