I suspect there's strong management pressure to not read the code or do "old fashioned coding"

Because this is the company whose CEO makes public pronouncements about how they're going to exterminate our whole profession any day now, how we won't be needed.

So if that's your ultimate boss, do you think he's going to let you stop, analyze, cautiously review, hand curate, hand edit?

To me the thing seems like a science project that got shipped as a product, with a complete lack of proper software engineering quality principles around it.

A gating procedure like this (and the HERMES.md thing etc) would never get past a code review process in any respectable shop that I've worked at. If I'd put up a code review like this at Google when I was there, it would been a pile-on of senior engineers demanding a better approach, no LGTM would have been given.

I can only conclude Anthropic is getting high on their own supply.

In any case, writing code to get features out the door has rarely been the block in our profession. It's usually process and review and understanding requirements.

And so the entire project feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of what shipping software as a team is actually about.