I’m starting to believe there are situations where the human code review is genuinely not necessary. Here’s a concrete example of something that’s been blowing my mind. I have 25 years of professional coding experience but it’s almost all web, with a few years of iOS in the objective C era. I’m also an amateur electronic musician. A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about this plugin that I used to love until the company that made it went under. I’ve long considered trying to make a replacement but I don’t know the first thing about DSP or C++.

You know where this is going. I asked Claude if audio plugins were well represented in its training data, it said yes, off I went. I can’t review the code because I lack the expertise. It’s all C++ with a lot of math and the only math I’ve needed since college is addition and calculating percentages. However, I can have intelligent discussions about design and architecture and music UX. That’s been enough to get me a functional plugin that already does more in some respects than the original. I am (we are?) making it steadily more performant. It has only crashed twice and each time I just pasted the dump into Claude and it fixed the root cause.

Long story short: if you can verify the outcome, do you need to review the code? It helps that no one dies or gets underpaid if my audio plugin crashes. But still, you can’t tell me this isn’t remarkable. I think it’s clear there will be a massive proliferation of niche software.