alt Hacker NewsI agree with your take, particularly because of this line in the article:
| the skills that define a strong blindfold chess player are the same as those of a programmer who can thrive behind a Claude Code terminal whilst not reading nor writing any code.
If you're actually not reviewing the outputs, you're just getting a fuzzy description of the state of the chessboard.
But I (and everyone I work with) use Claude Code in a workflow where I -do- review the outputs, or at least I make an honest effort to try. Rather than blindfolded, I think bullet (1-minute) chess is a fairly good analogy for this: you have all the info you need to keep your mental model up to date with reality, but the pace of change is too fast to do a good job unless you have a lot of preexisting chess expertise.
You learn a lot more by reading code than writing it.
So reading the output i believe is an immensely big gift by an LLM, because if you actually take note - and of course know your skills - then ot becomes such a great pal to work with.
I like reading what the LMM gives me, not always, but a lot of times.