Sometime between Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5, I stopped needing to even read AI-written code. I still read it sometimes to understand what they're doing, but most of the time code is fairly reasonable by default and asking them to talk about the code is more effective than reading it.

Thinking about this as Claude wrote me both a dumb game and a native app^[1] for my RSS reader and my only input was describing features I wanted and occasionally mentioning that bugs it mentioned fixing were suspicious and it should refactor to make the code less fragile / easy to make perform well.

One place where it's still worth reading code is where the code itself matters, like library functions. Claude still doesn't always understand the purpose of a function and names or documents it in a way that will confuse other people.

1. ^{^}

   If you're building a native app, you absolutely must give Claude a phone to test on though!