Code Is Cheap, Judgment Is Not: Planning and Testing Are Where the Value Lives
Particular-Intern-92 · reddit · 2026-11-04
The author argues AI has made the messy middle of software engineering — writing code — cheap; success now hinges on the beginning and the end.
Planning: the team turns a backlog into a Cursor plan covering current state, target, gaps, test cases and test data; a human reads it, argues with it, and edits before hitting Build — experience shows up as knowing what good looks like and which business rules nobody documented.
Testing, integration and launch: fitting work into live systems, proving it under real conditions, and shipping carefully consumes most of the effort; coding is a fraction of the time spent babysitting Cursor once the plan is solid.
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