Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majors

“Charity’s turning point in seeing AI as a generational change was in November 2025. This was due to Opus 4.5, but Charity argues that the coding harness (Claude Code) made the bigger difference. Because thanks to Claude Code, harnesses went from being more of a shell script to serious infrastructure.”

Gergely Orosz

“The question engineers need to answer: what would it take for you to be fully comfortable shipping code you have not read? Charity believes it is a “when” and not an “if” that professional software engineers will ship code they never looked at – and thus do not understand – to production.”

Gergely Orosz

“Her contrarian take: code review is overrated, and the least valuable part of what humans add to software engineering. Charity says that humans are good at conversations and deciding what to build, not reading code to check for correctness, syntax and bugs.”

Gergely Orosz

“Non-deterministic systems require more engineering discipline versus before. With code written by AI, we’re reducing the trust in the code (because we no longer wrote it), so we need to increase trust at the other part of the development process. Specifically, at validation: with things like tests, evals, and conformance testing.”

Gergely Orosz

“Charity finds small acts of taking control back in your work from AI tools help. For example, none of the Honeycomb team uses AI on Wednesdays.”

Gergely Orosz