If You're Not Reading LLM Code, Move the Rigor to Specs and Tests

The author argues that if an organization mandates LLM-driven coding to maximize speed, engineers can reasonably stop reading generated code—treating their high-level source the way they already treat assembly, bytecode, or transpiled JavaScript. The premise: LLMs produce non-deterministic output far faster than humans can review it, so diff-by-diff approval stops being a credible quality gate. Abandoning code review doesn’t mean abandoning rigor; it means relocating it.

Making this work is an organizational decision, not an individual one, and Amdahl’s law is the reason. Cranking out 20k lines a day is pointless if downstream humans still have to read and approve it, if work is sliced into REST-endpoint-sized tickets, or if a single product owner has to feed a team whose engineers each run four agents in parallel. The implication is fewer humans-in-the-loop, less coordination and gatekeeping, engineers acting as quasi-product designers owning whole work streams, and treating rework as cheap rather than something to prevent up front.

The proposed locus of rigor is the specification and the test suite—neither equivalent to prompts nor to TDD. A standardized Markdown spec becomes the canonical unit of knowledge, co-authored by product and engineering, checked into the repo alongside code, and enforced by automated PR checks that verify both passing tests and conformance to the spec. The spec, not the code, is what the team understands, reviews, and is accountable for.