Thorsten Ball: code review and unit tests will die in the AI era
zetalyrae · x · 2026-09-21
Thorsten Ball (Amp/Sourcegraph) lays out his beliefs about the future of software development, which zetalyrae shares with regret: we will lose formal languages, open source, and intellectual discourse around software.
Key claims:
- Code review is already dead: humans will only review systems and their composition, not every line in PRs.
- Unit tests may die too: Ball had a model write 900 lines of Arduino C that compiled error-free and ran perfectly — "why have training wheels if you never fall over?"
- The craft of writing code disappears, but the craft of building software — solving business problems, knowing when and how to ship, getting feedback — matters more than ever.
- Most bugs won't be coding bugs; they'll be "you asked for the wrong thing" bugs.
- Open source in its current form no longer makes sense: with artificial eyeballs, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" changes meaning.
- Human performance-critical contributions become an edge case in 99% of software.
Related event: Thorsten Ball Predicts the Craft of Coding Will Die(2 posts)→
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