June 15, 2026
Ctrl+Alt+Delusion
Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap
AI writes huge chunks fast, but humans are stuck arguing over the mess
TLDR: The big shift: AI can rewrite bloated software quickly, so the costly part is now human review and deciding what should never have been added. Commenters split hard between “let AI review AI” and “that’s how you ship disasters,” with plenty of snark along the way.
A spicy little workplace truth bomb just hit the internet: getting software written by AI is now cheap, but checking whether it should exist at all is the part draining everyone’s soul. The article’s big claim is that these tools don’t “take shortcuts” the way people do. Instead, they happily produce a giant custom solution when a simple existing tool would do, leaving humans to squint at piles of perfectly plausible code and ask, “Why is all of this here?”
And the comments? Absolute drama. One camp basically said, why are you doing all this reviewing yourself like it’s 2019? User simianwords shrugged that they use AI to review AI, calling line-by-line checking “dogmatic.” That got instant pushback energy from the reliability crowd, with eschneider delivering the cold splash of reality: broken stuff in the real world is still expensive. In other words, cute shortcut until your app falls over at 2 a.m.
Then came the existential spiral. Hluska worried that constant rewrites make code change faster than humans can understand it, which feels less like productivity and more like sprinting into a fog. Meanwhile, dmitrig01 won the snark Olympics by joking that writing blog posts is cheap now too, but making them sound human is the hard part. Ouch. Even the middle ground was tense: yes, AI can catch obvious mistakes, commenters said, but can it answer the scarier question — should this have been built this way at all? That’s the real comment-section cage match.
Key Points
- •The article says LLMs tend to generate complete implementations instead of choosing simpler existing libraries or imports.
- •keyPoints from the article: AI-generated code can be technically correct yet over-engineered, increasing the time and effort required for human review.
- •The author states that rewriting or simplifying AI-generated code is now relatively cheap because AI can quickly produce revised versions.
- •The author describes a workflow shift toward more upfront planning around scope, required components, and library choices.
- •The article argues that reduced rewrite costs make it easier to reject unnecessary complexity, while the cost of letting that complexity remain is unchanged.