I recently listened to this episode from the Claude Code creator (here is the video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQU9o_5rHC4) and it sounded like their development process was somewhat similar - he said something like their entire codebase has 100% churn every 6 months. But I would assume they have a more professional software delivery process.
I would (incorrectly) assume that a product like this would be heavily tested via AI - why not? AI should be writing all the code, so why would the humans not invest in and require extreme levels of testing since AI is really good at that?
I mean, I'm slowly trying to learn lightweight formal methods (i.e. what stuff like Alloy or Quint do), behavior driven development, more advanced testing systems for UIs, red-green TDD, etc, which I never bothered to learn as much before, precisely because they can handle the boilerplate aspects of these things, so I can focus on specifying the core features or properties I need for the system, or thinking through the behavior, information flow, and architecture of the system, and it can translate that into machine-verifiable stuff, so that my code is more reliable! I'm very early on that path, though. It's hard!
I've gotta say, it shows. Claude Code has a lot of stupid regressions on a regular basis, shit that the most basic test harness should catch.