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Vetting AI code caused burnout despite full comprehension
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Illustration only Photo by Martí Sierra on Unsplash
A developer reports that reviewing and refactoring an AI-generated optimization took a week each and left him burned out, despite fully understanding the final code.
For engineers, this suggests that the time saved by AI code generation may be offset by the comprehension cost of reviewing large diffs. The author's experience indicates that paying that cost incrementally during manual development might be less taxing than concentrating it after the fact.
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The author spent several days planning with a frontier coding agent, a week comprehending the diff, and another week refactoring.
He understood the final code as if he had written it himself, but was burned out.
He suspects unassisted development would have taken about a month, with comprehension costs paid incrementally.
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