Vetted AI code is hard to justify

Vetted AI code is hard to justify

Andrew · 17 August 2026 · 3 min read

I have been reflecting on a large optimization I built for my game with the assistance of a frontier coding agent. This optimization took me several days to plan with the agent, about a week to comprehend the massive diff it produced (I review and approve every line), and another week to refactor and refine it until completion.

By the end, I understood everything that had been built—as if I had written it myself—but I was burned out. Untangling and comprehending large amounts of clever, high performance code and deciding if it makes sense within each stratum of abstraction is taxing on the mind.

If I had built it entirely unassisted, I suspect it would have taken me about a month. It would have been difficult, but I would have paid the comprehension costs as I developed it, in manageable chunks, and burned out much more slowly.

I asked Claude make me an interactive visualization for how I perceive these relationships of coding, comprehension, and burnout: