You will be surprised by how many professional software engineers don't read their code or care these days.

I have seen a bubble sort function in a PR from an engineer with 10 years of experience. Meanwhile sort from standard library is easily available with one single line.

The bar has become as low as "it works" without considering what's in the code or whether the entire feature should even exist at all.

P.S. that same engineer sent out a PR of 200-file feature. The PR is so large that it freezes the latest MacBook Pro if you try to read it. Nobody reviewed it and he merged it himself. Nobody uses that feature, and nobody in the teams wants to maintain it. Now we are considering scrapping it.

I used to use Claude inside of a terminal within Webstorm until I realized I rarely looked at the code in the IDE. Instead I was creating draft PRs and reviewing the code in github. Now I use claude inside of herdr, and I appreciate having more screen real estate devoted to claude. As a long-time Jetbrains subscriber it pains me to stop using it. But at this point, I'm not sure what they could come up with that would be compelling enough for me to switch back.

>Are you paid to press enter at anything that Claude present to you?

I'm paid to create a product. If Claude does so without me having to look at the code, then that's what I'm being paid to do.

I just look at my own diffs in a draft GHE PR and iterate with my agent on Github. This is often a much better UX than trying to make sure every single linter or thing is consistent between my machine and the CI machine. We do use Docker but it's still just easier to do it all on the CI box / Github.

I keep lazygit open next to each Claude/Codex session that's working on a change, but over time scrolling the changes has gone from necessary to just out of curiosity.

At this point of 2026, if you're reading code and still catching things, then the problem was before the code was written. You should have decided more high level preferences like invariants before the work began.

And this is a good thing.

JetBrains still has best tooling for previewing changes, resolving conflicts, git integration. I get that vibe coders not necessarily need all that but it's the best class tooling money can buy.

I am mostly happy with Neovim with an LSP integration. I'm not going to say it's "lighter" or anything because rust-analyzer isn't exactly "small", but it is a simpler, and IMO "cleaner" interface. Also completely free.

Personally I don't use CLI anymore, Codex app is very good and it starts to look like how IDEs will be in the future. You can review code in a GitHub style diff and leave inline comments (super useful), have multiple agents work in parallel with or without worktrees, plus there is very good code navigation (especially if you ask followup clarification questions that will link to other parts of code).

Related, it amazes me how many seasoned developers don't know how to do basic tasks in their editor/IDE with the keyboard and instead rely on their mouse. Most people don't need to be super users, but it baffles me when I see a developer who hasn't at least learned the keyboard shortcuts for opening files and jumping to functions/methods, etc.

I do look at the code and have to correct Claude most of the time, but I've noticed that with AI-assisted coding, I mostly look at the diffs when i'm inside IntelliJ. I don't need a pricey full-fledged IDE to just look at files and their diffs.

I’m sure there are people who aren’t looking at the code at all. But for those that are I guess I’m wondering why bother with an IDE anymore? I’m finding I can just review everything I need to with a text editor like Neovim now. Even GitHub review is probably good enough for people.

What do you expect when management pressures engineers to tokenmaxx? This is a product of their doing.

you think these guys press enter?

> Are you paid to press enter at anything that Claude present to you?

I mean, sometimes work falls exactly at the tool's strongest suit/match.

I am trying to think of what a comparison here could be but, for example, I remember early days in my career where pretty much 80% of the work was writing boilerplate and using scaffolding/generator tools, plugging them in the various plumbing and pipes of the stack, and just ticking boxes through Jira

Lots of "CRUD" and/or similar "recipe" type of work that was really just turning your brain off and needed that grunt labour force

You may ask: why is the person even needed?

My answer is the same as before: I don't know, I didn't know why were they needed back them either, felt like all could be automated as well, maybe the cost to invest in automating and mapping that all out was never a priority and the ROI math was "good enough" for the business while leadership had other north stars they were worried about?

Using a CLI coding agent in your IDE's terminal is a terrible way to view conversation history and works poorly for organizing multiple conversations.

It only fits a hands-on, merely AI-assisted development approach, on one feature at a time, that is not typically productive compared to agentic development.

You might disagree, but you'll find that the proponents of the hands-on approach are losing ground every month as AI gets better at working autonomously.

When you give a ticket to a jr developer, do you look over their shoulder the entire time they write the code? Or do pause to answer questions, give feedback on how to go about a task, and review their results?

we use a better editor

I'm slowly accepting that this is the new reality.

I've spent 1 month between august and early september writing some of the best code of my life. LLMs only provided feedback, I wrote all the code manually, still remember it by heart.

I was very delighted by the many architectural iterations that led to it. 9 files, around 10k lines of code (of those, 7k tests).

By the end of super funny exercise I kinda realized that if I had the same feature vibe coded it would've been better. I would've done much more and progressed more feature wise.

I just feel stupid hand writing my code.

It doesn't help that I work with stellar individual contributors. All of my team mates (except a junior) are either all former faang or contributed to projects we all use (from the TypeScript compiler to Linux). And they are all abandoning if not spearheading the abandonment of reading code. I'm talking people that truly loved the technical aspect of it and excelled in it.

I just feel stupid, like I'm carrying a weight that I should abandon.

Comments like yours feel would've made sense 6 months ago, but now are crumbling.

Software is essentially so cheap and throwaway nowadays that letting LLMs write it is imperative. When you find your use cases you start reviewing it or rewriting it thoroughly.

If you need to review every edit that claude wants to make what's the point in using it? We're now treating it basically like a junior dev. Do our best to make sure that it's on the right path (leaning hard on the superpowers plugin) then let it work and look at the result. Though even that review is heavily AI assisted now. Our leadership has mandated that everything that can be done by AI, should be done by AI. We've only been in that mode for a couple of months but I'm starting to think that it's plausible with proper human steering and oversight.

> Are you paid to press enter at anything that Claude present to you?

And seen that JetBrains revenues still grew 6% YOY, it looks like after all there are still developers paying for an IDE.

I thought that by now, according to the AI kool-aid drinkers, there wouldn't be any developer anymore?

[dead]

I'm paid to produce software that has features and works.

Nobody cares how I get there or how ugly the code is. They care how fast I can do it and how reliable the software is.

I look at code sometimes, in down time, to see what's been done terribly by AI, and to fix it and hopefully fix the process so that things don't get done terribly in that particular way in the future.