Engineering without reading code

In 2024 my team built 2 web-based Interactives for our Science Curriculum. In 2025 we built 50, in 2026 we expect to build over 100. In 2024 Engineers collaborated with Writers to build Interactives. In 2025 Writers built the Interactives and Engineers reviewed and deployed them. In 2026 we’re getting Engineering out of the loop.

With AI we’re writing more code than ever, and more and more non-Engineers are involved in building with code. It is not sustainable for a human to read and review every line of code. Even if we do human review, the volume is so large and the context is totally gone – we can’t expect them to do a good job. So how can we feel safe? What techniques do we need to apply? What technologies do we build? How do we Engineer in a world where we no longer read code?

In this talk I’ll go through our journey of building small low-risk software without human review. I’ll talk about my experiments in building software without review, and the systems I’m building. I’ll also talk about the systems we’re using in production to drive high quality code and anti-fragility through AI review. Then how I’m thinking about the future of work in Software Engineering, and whether human review will be a part of that.