Review Taste

We used to spend our afternoons arguing about trailing commas and whether a switch statement was cleaner than a nested conditional. It was a simpler time, mostly because those arguments were easy to win if you had enough gray hair. In this era, the syntax is flawless because the machine does not make typos. It produces blocks of code that are structurally sound but logically hollow, leaving us with a much more expensive problem. We have moved from being editors of grammar to auditors of intent.

The machine-native world of 2026 has solved the “blank page” problem, but it created an “almost right” problem in its place. Your Copilot is a hyper-productive intern with a silver tongue and zero accountability. It is brilliant at syntax and rarely misses a closing bracket, yet it operates within a context window that doesn’t understand your business logic or the specific nuances of your production environment.

We have moved from being editors of grammar to auditors of intent.

This shift requires a level of review taste that isn’t taught in a prompting course. It is the ability to look at a thousand lines of flawlessly formatted Go and realize the agent used a library method deprecated three versions ago. It is the intuition to spot a security hallucination where the AI suggests a textbook regular expression that will lock up your CPU the moment it sees real traffic. You only get that sense by having lived through the outages, by having seen your own elegant designs collapse under the weight of a three-am production leak.

The real crisis is that the junior developer is being automated out of an education. They are being asked to develop judgment through observation alone, which is like trying to learn to fly a plane by watching a movie. We are building a massive intellectual debt by trading implementation intuition for immediate velocity. If we don’t start treating implementation as a protected apprenticeship, we will end up with a board of directors trying to land a plane they don’t know how to pilot.

Syntax is getting cheaper. Judgment is becoming priceless.